ZOZOPEOPLE

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

~ the obituary ~

ZOZOPEOPLE started in December 2008 as the in-house social network of a clothes shop. Start Today, which ran ZOZOTOWN and would later rename itself after it, described the thing as aiming at the ground between a blog and a social network, which is an unusually honest way to describe a product that nobody had a word for. The title tag called it a site specialized in hito-koto-mono, the stock Japanese shorthand for people plus everything they get up to and own. You needed an account to post and nothing at all to read.

The 2008 front page put ordinary people and celebrities on the same footing, and then added aliens for good measure. It closed by borrowing a line from a Japanese children's song about everybody being alive and everybody being a friend. Under that ran a rail of today's people and a rail of Start Today's own staff introducing themselves, and below those, the things Start Today sold. A shop had built a diary platform and then put itself in the sidebar of it.

By March 2015 the banner across the top was a number rather than a sentiment. A hundred and forty thousand fashion people and six thousand shops nationwide, it said, so come and connect. The notice that would take all of that down had been up since the fourth of the month.

~ the case file ~

~ one notice, five names ~

The notice is dated 4 March 2015 and it runs to about a dozen lines of plain text signed by Start Today. ZOZOPEOPLE would end at 23:59 on Tuesday 31 March because of the migration to WEAR. Then, in a line set off behind the little reference mark Japanese notices use for a footnote, it added that ZOZONAVI, ZOZOGALLERY, ZOZOQ&A and ZOZOARIGATO would end at that same minute.

Five products, one paragraph, one minute. ZOZONAVI was the shop directory and ZOZOQ&A was the question board. ZOZOGALLERY handed out wallpapers for your desktop and for your phone's standby screen, which tells you roughly how old the whole estate was by then.

The fifth name on that list came back. A second ZOZOARIGATO launched at the end of 2018 as a paid discount membership, showing its cut price permanently on the product page, and enough stores pulled off the platform over it that the episode acquired its own name in Japanese, ZOZO-banare. That one was switched off on 30 May 2019.

~ moving the diaries ~

WEAR had arrived in 2013 as an outfit app, the kind where you photograph what you are wearing and tag the pieces, and the notice gives the migration to it as the entire reason for the closure. There was a way out: your old entries could be transferred across to WEAR, and the deadline for transferring them was 31 March, the same day the site died. Miss it and the company said outright that it could not help you afterwards.

By the small hours of 1 April, Japan time, people.zozo.jp had dropped from seven thousand bytes to four thousand and was serving a single page written in the past tense. It thanked you and told you the service had ended on Tuesday 31 March 2015. The one button on it went to the shop.

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