BASEMENT.ORG
Posted by Richard Ziade on February 6, 2006, 05:01PMThe Naming Of Web 2.0 Initiatives Must Stop
This is an actual quote from Techcrunch:
Like Megite, Newroo is ultimately addressing the same market as Memeorandum. However, they have a number of squidoo-like features (this is meant as a compliment) to allow anyone to create their own topic-based version of the main service.
Somewhere along the way, it somehow became standard practice to name your products so they sound like an 8-year old's toys. I think it's now reached the threshold of ridiculous - and headed straight towards the next threshold: pretentious and annoying.
Applications sound like fluffy toys (Meebo, Zoozio & Loomba); gastro-intestinal medications (Fluxiom, Librivox, Zimbra); or just sites that refuse to end with the letters "er" (flickr, gTalkr and Wrickr).
The whole thing is a weird bastard descendent of the dot-com era and it's starting to freak me out. All of these names were obviously fathered by Google. There's no doubt that the GOOG has set the tone: convey a cute and fun image and everything else is going to be A-OK. The primary colors and simple interfaces. It's non-threatening and fun!
People have been giving Google a lot of flak of late with their earnings results and the whole China thing. The've even called into question their "Do No Evil" mantra. For me, everything else Google has done is up for debate...except this. This is evil, ladies and gentlemen. Pure, distilled evil.
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FeedBlendr allows you to enter the URLs to any RDF, RSS or Atom (XML) feeds you'd like and blend them into a single feed. We won't hold the missing "e" against them. (Thanks for nothing Flickr).... [Read More]
Tracked on March 1, 2006 2:14 PMComments
The fundamental problem is that every domain name you can imagine is taken. You probably bought basement.org long ago--nothing like that is open today and little startups don't have the money to buy from the squatters.
So, you either need an impossible-to-type string of words or some weird combination of characters. Once you do that, you realize that everything with lots of hard consonants is impossible to say or remember, so you're left with either:
1) Cutsey-sounding words with lots of vowels
2) A weird prefix or suffix
or
3) Numbers
So you're right, but after a certain amount of time with whois, you just have to pick something and go back to writing code... (Or you have to be a lot smarter than me.)
Posted by: Dan Gould (from Newroo) at February 6, 2006 7:29 PMI agree with dan, there's nothing worse than difficult to type URL's ;)
Posted by: phil douglas at February 6, 2006 10:02 PMLucky for you 'Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Professional' was released just before the 'Web 2.0 bubble' otherwise we all had books with 'mFlashR-IOM for Dummies' on our shelves... ;)
Posted by: Owen van Dijk at February 6, 2006 10:23 PMGreat post - I like how you think that this is the evil that Google is most responsible for. Damn them, damn them to hell! In all seriousness, it's at the point where people with no companies but cute 'products' are 'competing' against better products created by actual companies; we can only hope the stronger ones survive and the rest fade into obscurity and take their baby-named doo-doo's with them...
Yay, I blogged about something before you - probably the first and only time it will happen in life! (
http://writeonwriteoff.blogspot.com/2004/02/this-years-web-site-naming-trend.html)
Picking up on Dan's point, perhaps there's a 2.0 company name generator page out there. There are other 2.0 generators - but perhaps if the company name generator thing is created then we'll know that it's reached an evil saturation point... (if it hasn't already...)
Posted by: Rachel at February 7, 2006 1:02 PMLook, someone's posted a whole mess of them here: http://flickr.com/photos/stabilo-boss/93136022/ . A frightenning collection...
Posted by: Rachel at February 7, 2006 10:50 PMwww.sivcode.com BreakBeat Uruguay
Posted by: Andres Serron at February 28, 2006 11:40 AMI know its a year old, but this post is still just as relevant now. The dropped E drives me crazy. Even my own site's name is part of an annoying trend - the onomatopoeia combination. And I find it delicous (del.icio.us?) that Feedburnr links it.
Posted by: Ron C at February 7, 2007 1:32 PMI understand your frustration, but I think the combination of lack of short .com names left and the need to not have a name that is 30 characters long has spawned this. It personally does not bother me. I would rather type in meebo than www.multiplechatsessionapplication.com
Posted by: Pancake at February 10, 2007 7:21 PMPost a comment
Subscribe | © 2003-2006 Richard Ziade
I dunno dude, Im niether for nor against it really. Its just another form of creativity. I have seen some big corperates go over the top with product names and branding to the other extreme. Possibly the naming we are seeing is because alot of these products are/were in early beta and never released properly before some bigger company snapped them up. By which time the product had gained a following which said bigger company though might get damaged by a rebranding. Can anyone say longhorn, no i mean vista no really i mean...... All things in moderation seems to work for me and if you have a good product does it really matter!.
My thoughs only, Cam.
Posted by: Campbell at February 6, 2006 6:26 PM