

Dr. Seuss URL Names - jwecker
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/the-dr-seuss-jumble-naming-web-sites/index.html?hp

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pg
This guy is completely mistaken. It did at least occur to him that the two
most successful web startups to date, Google and Yahoo, both did what he says
startups shouldn't. He replies to that by saying that you can only get away
with a goofy name if people love what you build.

If he had followed that line of reasoning one step further, it might also have
occurred to him that, conversely, if you make something users hate, it won't
matter that you have a good name.

In other words, what matters is what you build, not what you call it. Names
just don't matter much. Which means he's wrong, since the thesis of this
article is that they do.

Startups choosing random names are in fact pursuing a near optimal strategy:
just choose something reasonably short and catchy, and spend your time working
on the product, because that's what matters.

~~~
boucher
Pogue isn't arguing that names are life and death for a startup, he's just
pointing out the obvious: Given two sites that do reasonably similar things,
the one with the "catchy" name is going to be remembered.

I think there is a tendency here to conflate short with catchy. In my opinion,
there's nothing catchy at all about any of these: Etelos. Iyogi. Oyogi. Qoop.
Ooma. Some of it may be a function of personal taste, but I think there's
plenty of room for improvement.

~~~
pg
No. If you read the article, he's complaining about names that are merely
catchy-- which is exactly what Dr. Seuss words are: interesting sounding, but
"meaningless" and "silly."

His claim that names matter for a startup is implicit in choosing to write a
whole article about how the names startups currently choose aren't good
enough.

~~~
boucher
I did read the article, and what he's really complaining about is words that
are "meaningless" and "silly", and still are not "catchy" (oxford: instantly
appealing and memorable). He's most concerned about the fact that the names
are not memorable.

There is obviously an implied claim that startup names matter to a degree, but
I think he makes it clear he doesn't think it's priority number one. Not to
mention, it wasn't a whole article, it was a blog post. He writes for the
Times, and he certainly didn't choose to make this the topic of one of his
printed articles. He certainly isn't the first, nor will he be the last, to
complain in his blog that web startup names these days kind of suck. I'm not
naive enough to think David Pogue's blog is anything like mine or most, but
it's useful to gain some perspective.

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mattmaroon
I don't think he understands the extent of the availability problem. We wanted
to avoid the Web 2.0-ish name, since our audience is a little more pedestrian,
and ended up having to write a script to combine keywords and check for
availability.

And there were certain keywords for which there was just no good option left.
For instance, sports. Our keyword list returned thousands of total availables,
only two of which contained the word sports. One of which was sportshit.com.

~~~
falsestprophet
It is a memorable name.

~~~
tlrobinson
Almost as good as expertsexchange.com

~~~
mattmaroon
Or whorepresents.com.

~~~
aston
Great place for Christmas shopping.

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scw
Naming probably mattered more in the era of phone books and neon signs: if you
didn't recognize the name as relating to the service you wanted, it counted
against the name.

These limitations aren't present with a URL; a short meaningless name is
probably better than a long meaningful one.

An interesting recent phenomena is companies replacing their trusted names
built up over many decades with a short, catchy, meaningless one: the
rebranding of Washington Mutual to WaMu comes to mind.

A better article on the same topic from the Post:
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2007/11...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2007/11/27/AR2007112702321.html)

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dskhatri
Some of the names are thought out! Kijiji means village/small town in
Kiswahili and gives a sense of locality.

~~~
mattmaroon
That's fine if your audience is a village in Africa. If you're targeting
English speakers, it's essentially nonsense.

~~~
dskhatri
Not really. Words from such languages are commonly found in the West.
Microsoft named their Silverlight search front end Tafiti which is also
derived from Kiswahili (tafuta - to search). Kiswahili is a widely spoken
language in East Africa. (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swahili_language>).
There are many other occurrences of the language in popular American culture!
It makes sense to borrow words from other languages when there is "just no
good option left" as you yourself say.

~~~
mattmaroon
Tafiti is gibberish too. Any word I haven't heard and can't squarely place the
language of is gibberish to me. And given that like 8 people who own a
computer have ever even heard of Kiswahili, Kijiji is gibberish.

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icky
> So little imagination is on display nowadays, you could create an algorithm
> that spews out comparable domain names with the click of a button.

pwgen! :-D

