…there just aren’t enough words. If we had more real words, we’d have fewer stupid-sounding companies like these and these and these. I’m involved in more than one effort to find a name and a domain. But still… Lopico.. Pageflakes…. Chuquet… Rrove… Kratia… Newsbump… Flagr… Neurosky… Seekum…. Vetro…. HyperSuper… Cluckoo… Plurn… DoHop… Blish… Noodly… Diigo… Woomp… Gliffy… Tagsy… Wrickr… Oyogi… Yub… Yubnub… Planzo… Qoop…
Is Arrrrrghhhh.com taken?
Time to start plundering other languages!
Jeff, I totally, 100%, completely disagree with you. Here’s why:
I work for a large government contractor. I can’t tell you how many times we have to deal with subcontractors that have painfully generic company names like “Computer Systems” or “Software Experts” or “SKW” or some other combination of boring words.
And you know what? It is a pain in the behind to try to Google these guys and find much info on them.
I randomly selected one company you named in your post: Qoop. 10 seconds ago I had absolutely no idea who they were. I just Googled them, and now I know they are a product that is connected with Flickr. There were 8 search results on the first page, and I could clearly see that at least 6 of the results were in fact related to the company I was looking for.
THAT’S why a unique name is important.
Trent:
Quite right. I just wish they didn’t so grate on the ear, eye, and tongue. Wrickr? Ouch.
Ah, but chuquet.com was chosen for a good reason: Nicolas Chuquet was a 16th-century French mathematician who was the first to come up with names for large numbers like million, billion etc.
I thought this’d be a neat name for a web app that tries to deal sensibly with very large numbers of blog posts.
So there was a kind of logic to it.
Hi Jeff,
The truth is, this naming shortage is not a new phenomenon. Think of boingboing.net, the popular directory of “wonderful thingsâ€. You don’t hear anyone complain of it anymore because we’ve become accustomed to it. Not to mention Google and Yahoo.
To a certain extent, it doesn’t matter what a product or service is called, as long as the service is useful, addictive, and easy to ‘google’.
David
of flagr.com
I was surprised to see my site name(Cluckoo)!! Surprised… not for being called stupid-sounding. It IS stupid-sounding (i prefer to say it sounds unique
)…but firstly, this isn’t a company yet (maybe one in coming months)…and its barely 4 weeks old into beta launch…
I wonder how would it look if I had my site’s name as http://www.post-about-your-neighborhood.com
Cheers,
Jay
Hi there,
There are many reasons why this phenomenon happens. There are two reasons for this. You’ve pointed out that normal-sounding domain names are already taken. (If not, the urls are probably long, and tedious to type out.)
The more important reason – branding. You can’t own a word that is common. Plus, a unique name allows you to stand out.
David / Rrove
Trademarks?
Jeff,
Besides what’s on surface, often a company name can represent an abbreviation of some meaning, and especially nowadays a company name is also tied closely to domain name selection and availability, if the company wishes to have a strong internet presence.
As we are all aware of, practically all simple English word’s domain names are taken. To make a new site memorable and easy to enter the URL for users, one must use lots of creativity to brand a new company.
In our case, well, honestly, it’s “trial and error†while we tried to come up with a combination of names that may fit our vision. Of course, the domain name search! That’s one of the hardest parts of all…
Then, one day, “Diigo†popped up during one of our brain-storming sessions. It fits into our vision perfectly, and the domain name is available! Its abbreviation stands for “Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff.†Visually, the two ii’s also symbolize people in a community. Plus, an unique & easy name to remember!
So that’s how Diigo was born!
Diigo is about “Social Annotationâ€, a superset of social bookmarking.
Diigo is packed with lots of advanced power features. It is still under closed beta. I would like to invite you and your readers to try it out. We’d love to have your participation and feedback.
Best,
-Maggie
Since everyone else has explained theirs, I’ll take a stab at explaining my domain. Lopico is simply Local Picks Online. I also own the domain localpicksonline.com, but it’s too long and not as memorable as Lopico. Plus, I couldn’t be on this and other list of weird names if I had a dull domain.
J.D. / Lopico
And Gliffy’s name comes from the word glyph, which is a symbol or character that imparts information nonverbally. Gliffy is a online diagram editor in which you use symbols and characters to create your diagram.
clint / gliffy.com
The real problem is domain-squatting. Having just spent some time looking for a corporate domain myself, I know that about 9 in 10 sites found from any reasonable search will be fake search-type pages that basically exist just so someone else will eventually buy it for a few hundred thousand dollars. This is true for a large majority of English words… check out congratulations.com, for instance, to take a random example. Maybe the problem is that there are too many words in English.
Our name is not an acronym like some of the others, but we were focusing on a more Seth Godin aproach to naming. I like what Maggie had to say about the two i’s thats pretty interesting, but their competitor Ma.gnolia I think is a bad name. Ma.gnolia is going to be hard to explain to normal people. You will try and tell them that the site is call magnolia, and then have to tell them that its ma dot gnolia dot com. The problem with that is the fact that less tech savvy users are going to get it. Also when it comes to Seth’s rules, and finding them on Google they are nowhere to be found. I am not trying to rag on them, I like their service, but think there name is going to hold them back. We were just playing with different synonyms of search…adding endings and such, and we found Seekum. The best part was that it would be easy to get on the top of Google, and sure enough we are the #1 results for the search. Thats important in today’s world. Check out what Seth has to say:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/10/the_new_rules_o.html
It’s important if you want your website to start off as succesfull as possible.
Kodak was invented by George Eastman. He liked the letter k and just wrote out combinations until he found one he liked. Worked pretty well for about 120 years.
NeuroSky isn’t stupid at all. It’s a perfectly normal-sounding name.
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