

Several fans even created websites and servers to continue sharing flipnotes after the shut down. Fans vocally protested the shutdown, and contacted Nintendo, Hatena, and even news media in an attempt to prevent the end of the services. Prior to the release of Moving Notepad/Flipnote Studio 3D, the closure of the Flipnote Hatena communities was announced, and have been inaccessible as of May 31, 2013. This lead to a practice referred to among the community as "star begging." These Flipnotes with no entertainment value, often direct copy of another, would quickly rise to the top of the Most Popular section. The ability to add infinite stars was a major drawback, as a large part of the Flipnote Hatena community became focused on receiving as many stars as possible. The Star system on Flipnote Hatena had a mixed reception from users.

The contents of these boxes were randomized, so users wouldn't know how many of each color they would receive, but the larger the box purchased, the more likely the user was to receive Color Stars.

In addition, users could purchase "boxes" containing a certain number of color stars. Red Stars were given to creators whose Flipnotes were featured in the Weekly News. Users could earn Green Stars by reporting inappropriate Flipnotes, using other Hatena services, posting Flipnotes frequently (based on the number of days they posted Flipnotes), or managing a popular Channel. In increasing rarity, these colors were green, red, blue, and purple. In addition to the regular Stars, users could purchase or earn Color Stars. The last Flipnote category to be added before the closing of Hatena in May 2013 was "Birds," a small category mainly consisting of a popular "Flipnote series" known as Birdie BAI.įlipnote Hatena also had its own economy of "stars." Stars were used to rate Flipnotes (similarly to YouTube's "like" function), and users could add as many stars as they desired to any Flipnote. Users were able to place categories they visited or contributed to most often into their own "Most Visited" folder. Another category that a user suggested to Hatena was a "Spoof" category, which included Flipnotes imitating songs, movies and other media. The series' animated cast, which consisted of floating faces and stick figures, established a basis in character design for comedy Flipnotes.
FLIPNOTE STUDIO DSI SERIES
For example, one category entitled "Stick Figures" was suggested by the creator of a popular comedy Flipnote series known as TeenChat. These categories, known as "channels," included general classifications such as "Musical" and "Comedy," as well as more specific categories suggested by popular Flipnote users and accepted by Hatena. When uploaded, Flipnote animations were placed into specific categories by their creators. Users could also flag submissions as inappropriate Flipnotes thus flagged will not be viewable via the DSi's Flipnote Hatena and may be removed from the website altogether. Flipnote Hatena was shut down on May 31, 2013.Īs for the website itself, Flipnote Hatena offered the ability for users to rate and comment on the works of others, as well as to embed their animations into other webpages. Users could also 'spin off' another user's Flipnote, by downloading it and editing it.
FLIPNOTE STUDIO DSI DOWNLOAD
Through the DSi portion of the application users were able to download Flipnotes to their DSi, add stars to Flipnotes uploaded by others, and upload their own. We rely on Hatena on that part." Flipnote Hatena is the name of both the portion of the Flipnote Studio application that connects to the Flipnote Hatena website as well as the website itself (the Japanese version of the program differentiates between the two, but not the English version). Speaking for Nintendo, Yoshiaki Koizumi stated they chose to work with Hatena because "it takes a special skill set to maintain the User Generated Contents (UGC) site, and we don't have that skill. Shortly before the release of Moving Notepad in Japan, Nintendo announced that they were partnering with Japanese web services provider Hatena to provide the means to share works created with the software.
