Yahoo! Loco

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

~ the last words ~

Twenty-six million people a month were already using the pieces before anybody glued them together. That was the number Yahoo Japan gave on 20 January 2011 when it announced Yahoo! Loco, and the number described seven separate products it intended to stop running separately. The announcement said the new service would open in early April. It opened on 1 June.

What it did was answer the question of what is near me. You searched a place or a shop or simply loaded the page, and Loco worked out roughly where you were from your IP address and whatever your Yahoo! JAPAN ID already knew, then put the restaurants and the hair salons on a map around that point, road conditions included. Businesses could claim a free Place Page and stock it with photos, video, coupons and the reviews their customers left. Map data came from Zenrin among others, and in November 2019 the rendering moved over to Mapbox.

The thing about a service like this is that it is only legible from inside the country it maps. A Turkish reader can understand every feature on the list and still have no use for any of them, because the whole value was knowing which of two noodle shops in Nakano was open at eleven at night. Loco was a very large, very detailed answer to a question nobody outside Japan was asking it.

~ the record ~

~ seven into one ~

The seven were Yahoo! Maps, Yahoo! Regional Information, Yahoo! Road Traffic Information, Yahoo! Gourmet, Yahoo! Coupons, Yahoo! Phone Book and Yahoo! Machimoba. Some of those had been running since the portal era and had their own habits and their own regulars, and the merge asked all of them to learn one interface at once.

The consolidation kept going after launch. Yahoo! Drive, which let you plan and save driving routes, stopped taking new users on 28 June 2012 so it could be pulled inside Loco too. The pattern held for twelve years and then ran in reverse, with Loco itself becoming the thing being folded into something larger.

~ the advertorials ~

In September 2015 Yahoo announced the results of an internal investigation into its own subsidiaries and said that paid articles had been published on Yahoo! Loco without being marked as advertising, presented so that readers would take them for editorial content. The same articles had been syndicated out to external media.

That is a particular sort of damage for a recommendation service. Loco's entire premise was that it could tell you which of the places near you was worth your evening, and the admission was that some of what it told you had been bought. Yahoo disclosed it voluntarily, which is more than most, and the product carried on for another eight and a half years.

~ where the reviews went ~

LINE Yahoo announced the closure on 8 February 2024 and shut the service on 27 March. The trade press headline reporting the death said Loco had run for eleven years. Its own body text said the service opened in June 2011, which makes twelve years and nine months, and nobody appears to have checked the headline against the paragraph underneath it.

Nothing was thrown away, which is the unusual part. Photos and reviews people had written across nearly thirteen years moved into the Yahoo! Map app under a tab called Posts, or could be read from a PayPay Gourmet account page. Restaurant booking history went to PayPay Gourmet as well. The company that had merged seven services into Loco in 2011 spent 2024 unmerging Loco back out into two.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »