It’s been 9 years since I met a webservice provided by Hatena for the first time. It was when Hatena Antenna, a webpage checker service, was launched. I had used Natsumikan to check updates before the service. Hatena Antenna was sort of impressive; it was easy to use, freed us from setting up our own server and efficiently crawled many pages to list up newly updated ones.

After a short while, they launched a blog service, Hatena Diary. In those days, blog had started being a popular word just among sort of early adopters all over the world. They took existing useful things from tDiary and added a very definitive feature; wiki-like keyword link for words included in blog entries. I thought it was sort of an ideal revolution for texts on the web. I believed that all the words/phrases in web texts must refer to more detailed resources because it was the superior idea of WWW.

Snip, snip and snip. I’m now working for the company as a software engineer. I hadn’t imagined at all I started working there as such an occupation near until my changing a job. Today, Hatena Blog was happily launched to take over the old one and offer newer and greater experiences to users. Though I haven’t done anything related with this service (because I’m now working on yet another new one), I’m really glad at the launch.

I don’t think as I used to do. Long time passed by from the ideal era. But the value of just writing/reading some texts on the Web hasn’t decreased at all. I’m personally convinced that we need not only release some short notions into the streams like Twitter/Facebook, but also sit in flont of our desk, look carefully into ourselves and write up a blog posts which have a certain level of length, structure and quality from our real hard thinking. At that time, Hatena Blog must be a help for us.