Yahoo! mocoa

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

~ the eulogy ~

The name is an acronym and the product artwork spelled it out rather than leaving you to guess. Yahoo! mobile communication application, with the first letters picked out in color across the lockup. Nobody says that out loud, which is presumably why it got shortened into a word that sounds like a hot drink.

What it did was collapse three separate things into one Java application on a SoftBank feature phone. Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger had each been its own download before this, with an address book sitting behind them; mocoa put all of it behind a single free Yahoo! JAPAN ID, the same one you already used on a desktop. The pitch was a friend list with presence on it. You checked the list to see whether somebody was actually around, then picked a way to reach them instead of guessing and waiting.

It was free, and it ran on the carrier's Java platform in a noticeably reduced form compared to its desktop parent. No file transfer. No voice chat inside the client. It signed you out after fifteen idle minutes and would hold three conversations at once, switched between with tabs. There was a sheep in the default theme, and a menu that turned in a circle, which the marketing described as a round-and-round easy-to-use menu.

~ the dossier ~

~ the compatibility list ~

The bundling was not left to persuasion. A handset that supported mocoa was removed from the supported-device lists for the standalone Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger applications, so on those phones there was no longer a way to install just the one you wanted. If you had bought a 910SH because you liked Yahoo's mail, the route to it now came with a messenger and an address book attached.

This is a small piece of carrier-era behavior that does not survive into app stores, where unbundling is the user's decision and a publisher who dislikes it can do very little. On a phone sold with software already inside it, the question of which parts you took was settled before the box was opened.

~ a wednesday ~

Japanese services die at the end of months. The register of discontinued SoftBank services runs to twenty entries and the dates in it are a wall of thirty-firsts and thirtieths: 31 March, 30 September, 31 October, 31 March again. Yahoo! mocoa went on 2 December 2009, a Wednesday, and it is the only entry in the whole list that is not sitting on a month boundary.

No reason for that has survived. There was no press coverage of the closure at all, from anybody, and no advance announcement has turned up in the archive. Whatever the reasoning was, it put the ending in the middle of a week, and the only document that records any of it is the one Yahoo left behind afterwards.

~ what it handed back ~

That document is still readable. The farewell page says that mocoa, with apologies for the inconvenience, ended its service on 2 December 2009, and thanks you for using it over a long period. Then it gives the forwarding address, and the forwarding address is the interesting part: mail will continue to be available through the mobile version of Yahoo! Mail.

Mail only. The messenger that had been bolted to it got no successor and no sentence, and the address book was not mentioned either. A product whose entire argument was that these things belonged together was taken apart on the way out, and the piece that survived was the piece it had absorbed in the first place. Yahoo! Messenger in Japan went on running until March 2014 without it.

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