yaplog!

» see yaplog.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The Japanese web solved personal publishing differently from the one I grew up on. Where I was, you got free hosting and an FTP client and whatever HTML you could stand to learn. Japan got rental blog services, dozens of them, each run by a large company and each with its own house style, and by the middle of the 2000s the question was not whether you had a blog but which company's blog you had.

yaplog! was GMO's. It began life as Yapeus, a service launched on 20 December 2001, which GMO picked up and relaunched in beta on 15 June 2004 under the new name. It stayed inside the group for the rest of its life, moving between GMO Internet and GMO Media Holdings before settling at GMO Media in 2007.

The positioning never changed in fifteen years. It was for beginners, and its pitch was more than five hundred ready-made blog designs, which sounds trivial until you remember what the alternative was. Every other platform of that era asked you to pick a template and then live with regretting it.

~ the case file ~

~ the audience it admitted to ~

The audience was young women, deliberately and openly. The designs skewed cute, the editor was built to be operated without understanding what it was doing, and the writing on it was daily life rather than opinion: what got eaten, what got bought, where somebody went. That is a whole genre of Japanese web writing and yaplog carried a serious amount of it.

It is easy to be condescending about a service whose main feature was decoration, so it is worth saying plainly that a platform built for people with no technical interest is a harder engineering problem than one built for people who enjoy configuring things. GMO ran it for fifteen years without ever pretending its users wanted to be developers.

~ the notice that stayed up ~

GMO announced the closure on 3 August 2019 and gave users until 31 January 2020. No reason was published in the notice, which is standard for a Japanese service ending: gratitude for the years of patronage, a date, and nothing about why.

The timing puts it in a queue. Yahoo Japan had announced the end of Yahoo GeoCities and Yahoo Blog earlier the same year, and GMO's own teacup, a rental bulletin board running continuously since August 1997, closed for good on 1 August 2022. The Japanese web spent three years taking down the infrastructure ordinary people had used to publish, and the replacement was Instagram.

yaplog.jp is still resolving. It returns a single page announcing that the service ended on 31 January 2020 and thanking everyone who used it, six years after the fact, which is longer than most companies leave the light on.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »