Hatena Co., Ltd. is an internet services company in Japan. It operates various services including the most popular social bookmarking service in Japan, Hatena Bookmark. Hatena is the collective name of the company's services. On July 19, 2001, it was founded by Junya Kondo in Kyoto. The company moved its headquarters to Shibuya, Tokyo on April 10, 2004. The headquarters were moved back to Kyoto in April, 2008.
Hatena Diary
Hatena Diary is Hatena's blog hosting service. On January 16, 2003, it was released as a beta version. On March 13, 2003, it was taken out of beta. Hatena Diary is a multi-lingual service which supports UTF-8character encoding. Hatena Diary has a free version and a premium version. The chief characteristic of Hatena Diary is its keyword system.
Hatena Notation
Hatena Notation, also known as Hatena Markup, is a markup language that can be used to produce content without the use of HTML. There is also a Perl module available to parse Hatena markup.
ID Trackback
ID Trackback is a trackback not for a specific blog entry but for the specific user. If a user links to another Hatena Diary in their own Hatena Diary, a trackback is added automatically. ID Trackback is used to inform other users about what a user mentions on their Hatena Diary, and is designed to accelerate interaction between users of the service.
Hatena Keyword
Hatena Keywords is Hatena's dictionary service and automatically links to common Hatena services which mention the keyword. If a user meets the requirements and becomes a "Hatena Citizen", they may create and modify Hatena keywords.
Hatena Bookmark
Hatena Bookmark is a social bookmarking service. It is often colloquially referred to as Hatebu. The user can save the specific URL as a bookmark and tag it. They are able to interact with the other users through the tags, and can leave comments of up to 100 double-byte characters in length. Hatena Bookmark counts the number of users per specific URL, therefore it is possible to see what bookmarks are popular among Hatena users. "Add to Hatena Bookmark" button is integrated into a lot of famous news sites, asahi.com, CNET Japan, ZDNet Japan, Nikkei ITpro, and ITmedia.
Hatena in English
In mid-2007, Hatena was made available in the English language. The services available on the English hatena.com site are:
