Remember when Prince changed his name to 
, The Unpronounceable Love Symbol?
Now we have ♫.ws, also known as The Unmentionable Musical Symbol.
According to this story in Wired online—where the musical symbol got scrambled into a question mark, and the link goes nowhere—♫.ws is a music search engine for Twitter users. It was developed by Sawhorse Media, which also created Musebin, "a site for Twitter-style music reviews," according to Wired.
Sawhorse Media has a nice handmade ring to it. Musebin isn't bad. But two eighth notes? At least tell us which key they're in.
It's hard to build word of mouth when you don't have a word.
Hat tip: Anthony Shore.
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And .ws? It's the country domain of Samoa, formerly known as Western Samoa.
At least when Prince did it, he had a real -- if bizarre -- reason for it. If you're trying to make brand recognition, what's the point of making an unpronounceable/indecipherable name?
Posted by: tanita | May 15, 2009 at 08:21 AM
Be careful not to confuse http://♬.ws/ with http://♫.ws!!! (You have both in your article)
Actually I don't think this name is _too_ bad...certainly passes a meme test. Love your blog...
Posted by: Richard Jackson | May 16, 2009 at 12:59 AM
I believe .ws used to belong to Western Samoa, but they opened it up so anyone can use it. (According to my computer science major brother, it now just stands for "web site".)
Posted by: Jonathon | May 16, 2009 at 08:59 AM
@Richard: In the TypePad Compose screen, both sets of notes look identical; once the post was published, one set appeared to bes ascending and the other descending. So that's another problem with using a symbol: it may not appear the way you intend it to. Indeed in the Wired article, the musical symbol appears as a question mark!
@Jonathon: Many so-called country domains are open to any buyer. Bit.ly, for example, is an American company that uses--gasp!--the Libyan country domain. It's a happy coincidence that .ws can stand for "web site," although that was not the extension's original meaning. Selling rights to domains has become a way for smaller countries to bring in some extra revenue, much as they did with the sale of commemorative postage stamps in the snail-mail days. I wrote about the trend toward using non-dot-com extensions in my Naming Trends of 2008 post: http://bit.ly/zj7up
Posted by: Nancy Friedman | May 16, 2009 at 02:51 PM