Flipnote Hatena

There is one thing that was weirdly foundational to my early online life that many people may have never even heard of because the service was so short-lived. That service was Flipnote Hatena.

WTF are you talking about?

Flipnote Hatena was a platform on the Nintendo DSi and only the DSi (not any other devices in the DS family) that enabled the creation and sharing of short animations. Using the touchscreen and stylus of the DSi users would draw approximately 1 minute long animations by drawing out each frame. You could record your own audio, too, which meant that it was also how I was first introduced to many of the memes at the time.

The reason I assume that many people have never heard of this service is because it was locked down to one specific device in the DS family, and the online sharing component was only available from late 2009 to early 2013. This means that not only did you need a specific console to create and view flipnotes, but you needed to be in the right age range to care about it at the time.

The project lives on

After I woke up the other morning randomly thinking about this old service from my childhood, I googled and quickly found Sudomemo, it turns out that every post ever made to the service is actually archived. If you found this post at all interesting, then please browse around this site and see if any of this one weird corner of the internet appeals to you as much as it did to a younger me.