Yahoo! Kukuru

» see kukuru.yahoo.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Yahoo! Kukuru opened on 28 September 2011 as Yahoo! Japan's version of something that was already working for somebody else. NAVER Matome, run by Naver Japan, had turned the curated link list into one of the most read formats on the Japanese web. Every large portal wanted one of those. Hatena shipped Hatena Matome, and Yahoo! Japan shipped Kukuru with a tagline about sharing joy and feeling, which is an odd promise to make from a search box.

The unit was a theme. You chose a subject, pulled links and pictures under it, published it, and other people found yours by keyword or off the new-and-popular lists. Staff kept a recommendation rail running across the front page, with a tag index below it for everything the staff had not picked.

In October 2011, a month after launch, Yahoo gave it the best distribution a Japanese consumer product can get: Kukuru themes were surfaced inside the Yahoo! Japan search results page. It still did not catch. Nine months after opening, the service was switched off and the host served a short page saying the provision of the service had ended, with thanks for having used it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the name was the strategy ~

Kukuru comes from 括る, a verb that means to bundle, or to lump a set of things into one category. It describes what the product did. It is also, carefully, not the word matome, which means to summarize and which is what everybody in Japan actually called this format, because matome was the competitor's word. Asiajin read the naming as deliberate avoidance at the time, and the reading holds up.

The search engine underneath all this belongs to a very short list of places where Google never became the reflex. Yahoo! Japan's box is the one Japan types into, by a margin, which inverts the situation everywhere I have ever sat down to look something up. Kukuru got planted inside the dominant search page of an entire country and still went nowhere, which rules out reach as the thing that beat it.

~ what the front page held ~

The front page survives intact in one last capture, taken 2 June 2012, a month before the end, and it reads like a weather report for the country it ran in. The lead block of staff-picked themes is about 節電, saving electricity. Easy power-saving recipes sit next to a theme on power-saving goods you can assemble out of a hundred-yen shop. Japan was in its second summer of voluntary conservation after the 2011 earthquake, and the national mood had worked its way down into the curation rail of a dying Yahoo side project.

The rest of the shelf is softer. Stretches for stiff shoulders sit beside a list of aquariums where you can meet a whale shark.

~ the nine months ~

In March 2012 Yahoo! Japan replaced its executive team. In May it began serving advertising on NAVER Matome as an ad network, which is to say it started taking money to help the original work. In June it announced that Kukuru was closing. Asiajin, covering the announcement, noticed that the notice on the site thanked users for their long patronage, the stock Japanese phrase for a service that has been around for years.

The page that replaced it on 2 July 2012 dropped the stock phrase. It says only that the service ended that day, and thanks you, sincerely, for having used it. The honest version was the shorter one.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »