Zenryaku Profile

~ the obit ~

Six point three million people had a page on Zenryaku Profile in 2010. Most of them were Japanese schoolgirls, and most of them had built the page on a flip phone by answering questions.

That was the entire product. You worked through a list of prompts, gender and birthday first, then where you lived and what you were into, and it assembled the answers into a page with an address short enough to say out loud. A diary feature called Real sat next to it. The site opened in 2002 out of a small company called KeepPrime, Rakuten bought it in 2003, and for the back half of that decade it was what Japanese teenagers meant when they said prof.

Rakuten passed it to Zappallas in January 2012, by which point the phones it had been designed for were on their way out of the country. Zappallas ran campaigns against it for four years without getting the return it wanted. New registrations closed on 31 August 2016 and the service ended on 30 September, fourteen years after it opened.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ filling yourself in ~

Prof sites are a Japanese genre with no clean equivalent anywhere else. The nearest western thing is the chain-mail survey people pasted into LiveJournal, except that here the survey was the entire site and the completed answers were the profile. You did not write about yourself, you filled yourself in.

~ the problem it became ~

The Japanese coverage of the shutdown does not read as pure nostalgia, because prof sites also produced a category of news article that ran for most of a decade. The pages were public by default and full of school names and ages, and adults used them to find minors. Japan spent the late 2000s legislating and arguing about mobile-site access for children, and prof sites were the specific thing under discussion.

Zappallas never published a reason for closing it. The reason sits in the arithmetic anyway: a service designed for a handset Japan had stopped buying, carrying a user base that had aged out and moved to Line, being asked to pay for its own hosting.

~ the signature under every post ~

None of this was pointed at me. In 2002 I was eighteen, and the container I wanted my identity in was a forum signature: a hardware list, updated whenever something in the case changed, sitting under every post I made on Turkish boards. It was the same impulse in a different container, and a good deal less honest than the Japanese version, because a prof page at least admitted it was a form.

The Japanese version had one thing mine did not, which is that the address was portable. A prof URL was short because it had to be readable off a scrap of paper and typeable on a numeric keypad, and that made it something you handed to people rather than something they stumbled onto. When the site closed, 6.3 million of those addresses stopped resolving on the same day.

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