

How Ninite.com (YC W08) was named by a program -- code included - swies
http://blog.ninite.com/post/620277259/how-ninite-was-named-by-a-computer-program

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pg
The name Viaweb was also generated by a program, though back then (in 1995)
practically all domains were still available and it was simply a matter of
picking. We were originally called Webgen, but we had to switch because
someone else had a site generator called that. So I wrote a program to display
all the names consisting of "Web" plus some short English word.

One thing I learned was that most short words are negative or at least
excessively blunt. Webpig, Webzit, Webfat, Webdog, etc. But one name the
program generated was Webvia. That wasn't so great but if you switched the
words it became a reference to the fact that our software worked over the web.

~~~
transmit101
> One thing I learned was that most short words are negative or at least
> excessively blunt.

There's an interesting reason for that.

Although English contains elements from numerous languages, it's two primary
ancestors are French and the Germanic Anglo-Saxon.

In the middle ages, most of the English peasantry spoke Anglo-Saxon. The
nobility, however, all spoke French for several hundred years after William
the Conquerer invaded in 1066.

To this day, that ancient split in languages is still obvious. Everyday words
in English, including words for animals, household words and swear words, tend
to be Germanic: short, guttural and abrupt.

Words to do with civic society, culture and the ruling class are usually from
French. They are usually longer and sound more refined. Examples: parliament,
judiciary, government, etc.

~~~
pg
While what you're saying is basically true, what it explains is why the earthy
words in English are Germanic, not why they're short.

Earthy words are short in French too. "Merde" is as abrupt as "shit." And
German is full of long words.

What's really going on is that earthy words tend to be short, whatever their
origins. And since English is not so much a mixture of Anglo-Saxon and French
as a core of Anglo-Saxon with a veneer of French on top, the earthier, more
basic words in English tend to have Anglo-Saxon origins.

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gfodor
Eek. You mentioned people can say your name multiple ways. When naming stuff,
I always try to avoid this. Particularly in cases where people's intuition is
50/50 for what is the "right" way to say it, as is the case here.

It will be the chalkboard screetching against your ear for the rest of the
life of your company, when new hires, new customers, or colleagues continually
pronounce the name "wrong."

~~~
jparise
Those were important considerations when George Eastman named his company
"Kodak", as well.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Kodak#Kodak_name>

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terrellm
I develop a herd management software for cattle ranchers and wanted to call
cattle-something. I wrote a program to generate lots of 3 and 4 letter
combinations and ended up settling on Max. I checked whois and CattleMax.com
was available. 11 years and 56 countries later, it's still going strong and I
couldn't imagine any other name for what our product does.

~~~
samd
That's a pretty awesome niche you've got yourself in, and your website/product
looks better designed than most industry-specific software I've seen.

~~~
terrellm
Thanks for the compliment. It's the result of an programmer marrying an ag
major and trying to find a career they can enjoy together. We couldn't find
one so had to create one.

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matthew-wegner
No offense to Ninite, but I think it's a terrible name. I've actually used it
three different times, a few months apart each, and I can never remember what
it's called. I have to Google for a variety of "Windows installation bundle"
terms and end up finding some Lifehacker/etc story...

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gstar
I'm showing my age, but it used to be uncool to hammer the WHOIS servers. It
might pay to use a bit of socket.gethostbyname() to exclude the domain before
you hit whois for the final verdict.

Really cool idea, though - impressed with the approach.

OBTW: On your name, in the US does ninite mean "night, night!" or "goodnight"
as it does in the UK?

~~~
gstar
Here's a version that does a socket.gethostbyname before it hits the whois
server:

<http://d14hvpftrmzdxx.cloudfront.net/namer-ns.py>

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derefr
> A surprising discovery from this name search was that there seems to be a
> certain name-iness to some words.

A while ago, I was testing just this assumption in the context of writing a
plug-in for a writing program (think Scrivener, not TextMate). I spent a few
weeks marking words, names and gibberish as "sounds like a character name",
"sounds like a coherent proper/common noun that wouldn't do as a character
name", or "is gibberish." I then fed this training data (about 100,000 data
points) into a bayesian classifier. The results were okay—it would agree with
me to about 80% accuracy—but I gave up on it because I didn't know enough
about ML to improve the error, and brute-force scoring another 900,000 words
myself just to get a possible 5% improvement seemed a bit bleak.

If anyone is interested in the data set, I could dig it out of storage; it's
probably heavily biased toward my preferences in what constitutes a "good"
name, though (my backup plan, if it turned out to be a _completely_ subjective
evaluation, was to get people to do about a hundred ratings through a website,
and then cluster their "creative aesthetics" against others' to help them find
people to work with.)

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iaskwhy
"Search helps, but to most people a website lives at name.com, maybe with a
www in front. Our stats seem to reflect this: 60% direct traffic, only 20%
search. 17% of those searches are ninite.com or www.ninite.com."

I wonder if the ratio of browser usage for those keywords are the same as the
browser usage of site visits. I say this because in Chrome, when there's no
link for ninite.com and I select it, it offers me the option to go directly to
that link. Every other browser* just lets you copy or search and when I was a
Firefox user I searched so I could get a clickable link from Google.

So my point is: is it possible that a large percentage of the searches for
"ninite.com" and "www.ninite.com" have that reasoning behind?

* Didn't test in Opera but tested it in IE8, Firefox and Safari.

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zach
Okay, so it's a very convenient parametrization to limit the search to a low
character length. That way you can score a six-letter domain name, which is
bragable. But I think this is a premature optimization.

Hackers (in particular) get hung up on minimizing characters, which is not at
all the most important business function of your domain name. Never have I
gone to type a long domain name, only to give up halfway through to instead
visit a shorter-named alternative, a la Porky Pig.

Domain naming should instead seek to increase memorability, enable verbal
communication of the name, strike a proper emotional tone, and avoid spelling
ambiguities. If that happens to result in a ten-letter domain name, you know
what? It's okay. Nobody cares how short your name is if they've forgotten it.

It occurs to me that to increase memorability, we should take a cue from
mnemonics. People tend to be squeamish about mnemonic devices. Have you heard
of these memory competitions where people memorize the order of a deck of
cards? You would think that the people with superhuman memories have no need
for "silly tricks" like visualizing animals instead of numbers, but in fact
it's the effective use of those techniques that helps them memorize far better
than the average fellow. The point is that some things are practically always
more memorable.

In particular, concrete nouns, sensory adjectives, visceral actions and terms
relevant and descriptive to the subject are inherently more memorable than
abstract, generic, irrelevant or nonsensical words. Words that are harder to
memorize accurately are also more easily misremembered for synonyms or
similar-sounding words.

Finally, when you have a mnemonic device in your domain name, reinforce it. I
would never have remembered Silverback if it wasn't for that darned cute
gorilla. Even if I couldn't remember the exact name, it's the first result on
Google for "gorilla app," which points out another advantage of their naming
strategy.

I'm interested in what websites people can never remember. My hypothesis is
that their names would mostly be very anti-mnemonic in nature.

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nanijoe
I'd never heard of Ninite the YC company until this post..on the other hand, I
think I hear the word every night , when my daughter is telling me good night.
I'm not sure I would have picked that domain name if I ere in their shoes,
since to most people , the nite in Ninite might indicate that the company has
something to do with night time, which it does not.

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0nly1ife
I did something similar when naming my first company (davcro). I was inspired
by Adidas, which was derived from the three letter prefixes of the founder's
first and last name: Adolf "Adi" Dassler.

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mattmaroon
We did the same thing back when we started draftmix. We put every sports
related term we could think of in, then some suffixes just in case, and had a
script do this.

You would not believe how few available urls popped up. And most of the
availables were something like "sportshit.com" (meant to be sports + hit)
which were unused for obvious reasons.

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kowen
I've had some success playing with wordoid.com to come up with "name-ey" or
"word-ey" names.

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ntoshev
When you get ngrams from a dictionary as opposed to a real text, you do not
account for the different frequencies of the words. You might get better
results with ngrams calculated from plain text.

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gphil
One of the first results I got back from this script is "guiism." I'm
surprised that hasn't been snapped up by any designers out there.

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brianwillis
My favourite so far has to be "bertse" which sounds kind of whimsical.

~~~
philwelch
It sounds like a mashup of Bert from Sesame Street and goatse to me.

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jeffiel
Ha, got "feeces"

