Fritinancy

Help Wanted

Job posting on Gigbert (Boston area): monkey typists pay: $100 due: today, 12pm (2 hours) looking for a monkey who can bang on my keyboard to try to find the one random sequence of characters that is not yet taken as a domain name.

Photo: Uncyclopedia.

(Via Joho the Blog (David Weinberger.)

Naming Trends of 2008 (Mid-year Edition)

If 2007 was the Year of Naming Giddily--remember Meebo, Thoof, Kwout, Tapatap, and Oovoo, to cite just a few examples?--then 2008 is shaping up as Reality Bites Back. Real-word names, real-word phrases, and compound names formed from real words are suddenly on the rise. True, some of them make no more sense than last year's silly, baby-talky coinages. But at least they're recognizable, pronounceable, and relatively memorable ... and don't make you feel like a total idiot when you repeat them.

Here are some newly hatched names I've spotted in TechCrunch posts and on Go 2 Web 2.0 ("the complete Web 2.0 directory) this year:

TripSay (travel planner)

RocketOn (massively multiplayer online game)

SodaHead (an opinion community that asks, "What's bubbling in your head?")

Multiply (media sharing)

FriendFeed (lets you read all the posts, Twitters, and links your "friends" have sent)

SocialBrowse (link sharing in Firefox)

Smilebox (create greeting cards, etc., using your photos)

RepairPal ¹ (find and rate auto repair shops)

DriverSide (car buying and maintenance)

SearchMe (visual search engine)

RedKaraoke (free karaoke songs)

When Is Good (a meeting scheduler)

TinyPaste (shrinks blocks of text the way TinyURL shrinks long URLs)

Greenplum ² (database technology)

SpeakLike (multilingual IM translation)

I Vote for Art (browse, rate, and buy art)

I Took This on My Phone (photo uploading from--you guessed it--your mobile phone)

And here are a few additional mini-trends I've been tracking:

• Syllable and initial-letter clipping: Apture, Posterous.
• More numerals (a continuation of a 2007 trend): Peer39³, 280Slides, Orb 24.
• Inventive domain extensions (another continuation of a 2007 trend): Chi.mp (dot-mp is the country extension of the Mariana Islands); Grou.ps (the site is in English and the company's founders are Turkish, but the domain uses the Palestinian Territories top-level domain, dot-ps).

Read my post about naming trends of 2007.

____

¹ RepairPal is a client of mine. I'll have more to say about my work for them sometime soon.

² Yet another example of the Fruit of the Year category that blossomed in 2007 with RedPlum, American Express Plum card, and Plum magazine.

³ I was certain this had to be a punny company located incongruously in San Francisco's tacky Pier 39 tourist trap. But no: it's in New York City!

From the Mailbag

This post is guaranteed to be 100 percent reader-generated!

Mark Gunnion forwards a link to his favorite new product name: the Looj™ remote-controlled gutter-cleaner from iRobot. Yep, it shoots down your gutter just like a little luge and "blasts out debris, clogs and sludge." Comes with a handy holster, too!

Christa Allan thinks someone should have paid closer attention to the way this domain name looks: http://goredforwomen.com. "The campaign is to draw attention to women's health, specifically heart problems, by wearing red," Christa writes. "I suppose being gored for women is the ultimate sacrifice." (¡Olé!) For more insights into unintended parsing issues (remember Pen Island?), check out Tate Linden's post on Putincups.com.

"The umlaut is officially no longer hardcore," declares Dan Holbrook, who blogs at Language Is the People's and therefore knows about the heavy metal umlaut (aka "rock dots"), as in Mötley Crüe. He forwards photographic evidence:

  

The Spä line is made by a company called BeautiControl, which does sound a tad Teutonic. (Photo swiped from eBay.)

Judith K. thought I'd like NuttyBuddy, which she discovered while shopping for equipment for her adolescent son. She was so right. NuttyBuddy's tagline is "Protecting the Boys"; its product is "the first athletic cup that was designed to protect the full groin area of the male body." You've got to love the "size tool" that tells you whether to order "The Hammer," "The Boss," "The Hog," or "Mongo."

Jan Freeman, who writes about language for the Boston Globe, is amused by an ad she saw in the New York Times for a jewelry store on Fifth Avenue. "The headline is 'My Kingdom for your Old Jewelry,' from, of course, Shakespeare's libellous play about the last of the Plantagenets, Richard III. The picture is a portrait of Henry (Tudor) VIII, son of the Henry whose rebellion killed off Richard and his line. The name of the store is Windsor Jewelers Inc.--and though Windsor is old, it wasn't a royal name till the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha royals decided WWI was a good reason for the name change."

Jan adds: "Perhaps I was sensitive to this because I just finished reading Josephine Tey's classic pro-Richard III mystery, The Daughter of Time. But I would think many a Shakespeare fan would notice the odd juxtaposition. Or am I too optimistic?"

By the way, I highly recommend Jan's Sunday columns, which examine newsworthy issues such as the spurious origins of the phrase "belly up to the bar." 

"A Difficult Name Is a Really Bad Thing"

You've got to appreciate the candor of a confession like this one:

The name SimulScribe totally sucks for our business. People have a real challenge remembering the name and they cannot spell it, which is a real problem considering that new customers need to type in our web address to sign up. When your company offers a consumer product that relies on viral marketing, a difficult name is a really bad thing. In fact, I’m constantly amazed at how well we have been able to do with such a shitty name.

That's voicemail-transcription service SimulScribe founder James Siminoff talking to TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld, who continues the story:

Siminoff has been looking for a new name for two years, one with a domain that wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg. Finally, a few months ago after a red-eye flight from LA to New York, after not returning many phone calls for days, a friend left a message saying he was tired of playing phone tag. Siminoff immediately called his chief marketing officer (at 6:30 in the morning) and told him to buy the domain. But PhoneTag.com was taken.

Four months and $30,000 later, he bought the domain, and today SimulScribe is changing its name to PhoneTag.

The change takes effect at midnight PDT today.

I'd go even further than Siminoff and say a difficult name is a really bad thing for every business. And a name based on features ("simultaneous" + "transcribe") is almost always less effective than a name based on a benefit or an emotional connection. Your customers are much less interested in the details of your product or service than they are in the answer to one basic question: "What can you do for me?"

TechCrunch has been running a poll: "Was $30,000 Too Much to Pay For The PhoneTag Name?" Votes are running three-to-one against--in other words, readers think $30,000 was a fair price. A couple of the choicer comments:

I’ve simply lost the ability to keep up with all the Flernbys and the Shpoobas and the Squaldigoos. I think this will be the best $30k this company ever spends. -- Wayne

Well, it may have cost $30K, but it got people talking about them again and how much is that worth? Good PR move AND a better domain name - money well spent and a great move in my book. -- Ryan

On the flip side, James McDowell comments that he and his startup team took their time "while still in early development" to source a good name for their online travel agency. The result is Off2.com, which they secured for just $60 at domain broker SnapNames. I think Off2 is a very good name--short,  memorable, not too contrived. And it has great potential for a tagline, advertising ("Where are you off to?"), and other branding programs.

Via The Trademark Blog, with a hat tip to Seattle trademark lawyer Bob Cumbow. Bob offered this legal perspective on PhoneTag:

Although a great improvement over SimulScribe, and a clever bit of wordplay, PhoneTag might not be the best mark, given its connotation of failed communication. E for effort, though. 

The Horror!

Programmer Jeff Atwood, who blogs at Coding Horror, has a new nightmare:

As I work on UI prototypes for the new web venture, I've been brainstorming names for the web site we're building. I've surveyed some of the finest minds in the software developer community (for very small values of "fine"), and we've come to a collective realization: naming a website is hard. Really, really hard.

To demonstrate, Jeff has posted the results of his brainstorming in the form of a poll. Of course, everyone's a critic. From the comments:

Privatevoid sounds like a bodily function. :) -- Andy Lee.¹

How about "codercountry.com"?  -- Dan K.²

I must have that kinda brain, i never have trouble coming up with names! , develogical, devel-lution, Develutionary, codaholics, (and codaholicsanonymous ) savethecoder, (the obvious, d'oh) softwaredeveloperscommunity, softwareslew, all have every op available but not for long! Oh but better jump on softminded! I have MANY more, but keeping em to myself, will let them go for the right "price" -- D.³

hexoffenders.com :p -- Gustavo Duarte ⁴

Ah yes: naming is hard. So is programming. So are graphic design, tax law, biochemistry, and cabinetmaking. I do one of those things and not the others. And here's what I know about that one thing:

1. Just because you're very good at one skill, like programming, doesn't necessarily mean you're very good at another, like name development

2. Brainstorming is a useful technique, but not the only one, in the name-development process.

3. Never, ever submit your naming choices to a focus group.⁵

4. Buying a domain is not the end of the world, if the domain is a strong one. It isn't necessarily even a budget-breaker.

5. You can't develop a good name if you haven't first researched the competitive landscape, created a brand personality, and laid the rest of the creative foundation.

6. Professional name developers are your friends. Commenter Mark nailed it:

I think you are asking the wrong people... "branding" (that's what this is) is not typically a skill most software developers possess. Do you know any creative directors/brand experts? If so, I would recommend you get their advice!

Hat tip to Mike Pope, who writes two excellent blogs: Mike's Web Log and Evolving English II.

___

¹ I vote for "Private Void" for the title of a graphic novel about an angst-ridden GI serving his third tour in Iraq.

² Dan K., let me introduce you to marketing savant Seth Godin, who warns of the perils of generic naming: "Jewelry Central is a really bad brand name. So are Party Land, Computer World, Modem Village, House of Socks and Toupee Town."

³ You go, D.! I'm sure none of us can afford your "price."

⁴ This is actually pretty funny, if you get the reference to "hex."

⁵ For one thing, you run the risk of someone in the group snapping up the domains and holding them for ransom.

Naming Trends of 2007

The good, the bad, and the unpronounceable: the year in brand nomenclature.

1. Silly Semantics: Baby internet businesses continued to choose baby-talk names--a blend of Dr. Seuss, robotic beeping, and random babble. There were nonsensical names like Thoof, created via computer algorithm and selected only because the .com domain was available. (Also the soundalike Doof, "an online playground." Oof!) Logic-defying names like Xobni ("inbox" spelled backward) and Kwout. Copycat names like Meemo, Meebo, and Bebo. And oodles of names with the long-u sound that made Google and Yahoo famous: Doostang, Hoooka (three o's!), Yuku, Hulu, LoonaPix, YooGuu, Helperoo, Grabaloo, Snooth. (I'll have more to say about Snooth in the new year.) Everyone wanted to be the next Google and Yahoo; everyone thought the secret was that "oo" sound. That's magical thinking (and bad branding) at its most naïve.

2. Thinking Globally: It started with Del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site that incorporated the United States country domain into its name rather than simply tacking on ".com." Gradually, other companies found creative ways to integrate country domains--usually from small countries that can use the domain-registration income--into their names. Some of the cleverer creations: Outside.in (a U.S. company using the India country domain), G.ho.st (U.S. company, São Tome domain), Wis.dm (U.S. company--I think--with a Domenica domain), and Eye.fi (U.S company, Finland domain). The trend goes beyond U.S. borders: Mormor.nu--a Danish needlecraft company using the domain extension of the Polynesian nation of Niue--translates to "Grandma.now."

3. By the Numbers: Yes, we're still seeing numerical clichés like 360 to mean "all around" and 411 to mean "information." But some businesses found original and meaningful ways to turn numerology into branding stories. I've written about 23andMe, the genetic profiling company named for the the 23 pairs of chromosomes in human DNA. Not new but very influential is the business-software company 37 Signals: the name comes from the number of radio waves we've received from outer space that scientists think indicate intelligent life. (Obscure, yes; but very cool indeed to the target geeky audience.) 8020 Publishing's name, which I wrote about here, comes from the 80/20 rule: 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the effort. The 1865 Company, a retailer targeting upscale African-Americans, takes its name from the year the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, abolishing slavery. Numbers also showed up in restaurant names: Hawthorne Lane in San Francisco became Two, supposedly because "it's the second restaurant at 22 Hawthorne Street with two chefs." They should have stuck with Hawthorne Lane. And I read recently about Parcel 104, a pricey restaurant in Santa Clara named for "the original lot number on which it sits": a bad excuse for a name explained in bad prose--the restaurant doesn't sit on a number. (Parcel 104's About page also misspells "pear orchard" as "pear orchid." I've never eaten there, but I already have indigestion.)

4. You, Me, They: Personal possessives have been around in internet names since MyYahoo and My eBay. What's new is the more expansive use of pronouns in nomenclature. The second person showed up frequently: RockYou (a photo-sharing site), WikiYou ("the unauthorized biography of every person on earth"), ViddYou (a video-blogging network), PeekYou (a people-search engine). Vostu, a Spanish-language social network, combines the second-person-singular pronouns vos and tu. And Dell's new Vostro computers for small businesses appropriated the Italian word meaning "yours." Wesabe, the personal finance site, can be read as "we savvy" and as a twist on "wasabi," the Japanese horseradish. There were third-person-pronoun names, too, like They're Beautiful (free "virtual bouquets") and She's Geeky, a conference for women in technology.

5. Brought to You by the Letter K: Back in April, Laura Wattenberg wrote in the Baby Name Wizard blog that "if any letter defines modern American name style, K is it." Corporate America--or at least that portion of corporate American in its Internet infancy--was on the same wavelength. Names beginning with "K"  seemed fresh, fun, and youthful: Kindo , Kontera, Kiwork, Kindersay, Kublax, Kerpoof, and--most notably--Amazon's new wireless reading device, Kindle. Even silent "K" had its say in names like Knuru and Google's knew (whoops!) Knol.

6. Sorta-kinda: "I'm not a Jew, just Jew-ish," the British humorist-physician-theater director Jonathan Miller once said. Likewise, many company names were name-ish this year. Examples: the book-review site Revish, the help-ticket-tracking site Ticketish (which uses the Saint Helena domain, .sh, and thus also qualifies in Trend Category #2), the content-management service Texty and its sister site Yieldy, and the online collaboration tool Stixy. (I know the suffix -y has many meanings, but in these examples it seems to be a synonym for ish. For more on ish as a contemporary cultural signifier, see these Urban Dictionary entries.)

7. Fruit of the Year: Plums were ripe for the picking in 2007. American Express introduced its Plum Card. Valassis Communications announced that its online coupon portal, RedPlum, would go live on Jan. 3. And Plum magazine--"the first-ever pregnancy magazine for women over 35"--celebrated its first year of publication. The magazine's tagline, "Something especially prized," conveyed the most desirable meaning of "plum." Of course, if any of these ventures fails, there will be no end to the prune jokes. Runner-up fruit of the year: lime, as in the Gap's new shoe site Piperlime as well as Gaiam's "healthy living" site Lime. 

8. Gross Me Out: Marketers of consumer products seemed to think that naughty potty humor was what shoppers craved. Which is how we got MomSpit no-rinse cleanser, Alligator Poo candy, Mother Effer's Va-J-J Jelly, and a host of similarly named items. Recommendation for 2008: Wash your mouths out with Squid Soap!

That's two trends short of the traditional end-of-year Top Ten. Want to round out the list? Leave a comment; I'm compile the best suggestions in a post later this week.

Bonus link: Lots of new web names at Go2Web2.0.

Web Company or Pharmaceutical?

"One thing that Web 2.0 companies and prescription drug makers have in common is their nonsensical product names," says "Andrew" on the user-generated quiz site Quibblo. Take his 40-item quiz to see whether you can identify the correct column for names like Canocal, Hyzaar, and Profilactic. I scored a modest 78 percent, and I do this stuff for a living!

P.S. There's one error in the quiz, but you'll have to complete your answers and read the comments to discover what it is.

(Via New York Times.)

"A Dr. Seuss Jumble"

New York Times technology writer David Pogue blogs about the sorry state of domain naming:

These are all actual Web sites that have hit the Web in the last year or so: Doostang. Wufoo. Bliin. Thoof. Bebo. Meebo. Meemo. Kudit. Raketu. Etelos. Iyogi. Oyogi. Qoop. Fark. Kijiji. Zixxo. Zoogmo.

These startups think that these names will stick in our minds because they're so offbeat, but they're wrong. Actually, all those twentysomething entrepreneurs are ensuring that we won't remember them. Those names all blend together into a Dr. Seuss 2.0 jumble. ...

But here's a little wakeup call: People will learn to love your site's wacky name only if they fall in love with the site itself. Google and Yahoo became household nutty names only because everyone loved their services. They did not succeed because they had silly names.

I've written similar complaints myself. Now I'll be able to say "I told you so ... and so did David Pogue."

Snowclones with a Twist

The other day, within a half-mile radius in downtown San Francisco, I spotted four billboards advertising four brands of vodka. The proliferation of vodka brands is an interesting story in itself, but not what I want to talk about here. No, what caught my attention was that three of the four billboards employed snowclones in their slogans.

A snowclone is a formulaic cliché such as "X is the new Y" ("Pink is the new black," "Vodka is the new whiskey"). The term derives from linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum's famous "If Eskimos have N words for snow, then surely X have Y words for Z." Erin O'Connor, also a linguist, has been compiling an ambitious Snowclones Database.

I'd been musing about clones anyway, ever since reading Laura Ries's post on copycat brand strategy. However, I suspect that the creators of advertising sloganclones--as I propose to call them--aren't employing a conscious strategy. More likely they think they're being savvy and original. A little research demonstrates otherwise.

Here are the three sloganclones I spotted. (The fourth billboard, for Russian Standard vodka, simply reads "Pure Russian." Boring and undistinctive, but not a snowclone.)

Svedka--a nicely constructed name for a Swedish vodka, combining three letters from "SvenskeSvenska" (Swedish for "Swedish") and three from "vodka"--is the brand with the buxom "fembot fatale" and the website copy that declares, "It's time to party like its [sic] 2033." The snowclone on Svedka's billboard invites drivers to "Make cocktails not war." (Image via AdRants.)

"Make X Not Y" was popularized as "Make love, not war" by the 1960s counterculture and used by John Lennon in a 1973 song. The phrase is what students of language call a "winged word" that "flies" from its original context into the general culture. It became a snowclone when sloganizers began switching out the nouns to create taglines and headlines such as Make Falafel, Not War (International Herald Tribune), Make Wine, Not War (New York Times,  Café Press, and others), Make Levees Not War, and Make Love Not Spam. (Update: Johnny Cupcakes in Boston sells this Make Cupcakes Not War T-shirt.)

The second sloganclone is attached to the oldest brand in this bunch, Stolichnaya, whose handsomely designed ad proclaims Stoli to be "The Mother of All Vodka from the Motherland of Vodka." I'd seen this ad previously, but not since reading my colleague Tate Linden's commentary on "Mother of All X" over at Thingnamer. Tate notes that "Mother of All X" has been used thousands of times to promote products and services since Americans first heard Saddam Hussein threaten the "mother of all battles" during the first Gulf War. (I'm rather fond of "The Mother of All Search Engines" from Mamma.com.) In English, "Mother of ..." carries additional impact: It suggests a no-longer-shocking interjection ("Mother of God!") and the still-somewhat-shocking "motherfucker." Note the kicker at the bottom of the ad: "Choose Authenticity." Rather amusing when you consider how oft-cloned the slogan is.

For me, the most interesting combination of brand name and advertising slogan is 360 Vodka's "Saving the Planet, One Glass at a Time." This 360 Vodka is not to be confused, by the way, with Three Sixty Vodka: The latter comes from Germany and the former, a division of McCormick Distilling, is made in Weston, Missouri. (Want to be really confused? The brand name is 360 Vodka; the URL is vodka360.com. According to public records, vodka360.com changed hands in 2006 for just $1,000. You too can join the party: There are lots more "360" domains for sale here. Herpes360.com, anyone?)

The "360" part may be imitative, but other features of this brand stand out in a crowded field. 360 Vodka calls itself "the world's first green vodka": The liquor itself is clear, but its greenish bottles are made from 85% recycled glass and the distillery "has improved its eco-footprint measurably over the past 5 years." The website is sprinkled with "eco-factoids" such as "The average person generates 4.5 lbs. of trash every day." Remove the closure from a 360 Vodka bottle, mail it back in a prepaid envelope, and the distillery will donate $1 to "recognized environmental causes" through its "Close the Loop" program.

But back to the slogan. Just how popular is the formula "Saving the X, One Y At a Time"? Very. Take a look (note: some of these examples are title-clones):

Saving the World, One Drink at a Time: Martini Groove, a spirits blog

Saving the Planet, One Socket at a Time: Engadget

Saving the Planet One Atom At a Time: Carbon Reclamation Project

Saving the Planet, One Toilet At a Time: The Plumbing Guys

Saving the World, One Treatment At a Time: subtitle of book by Chemo Girl

Saving the Earth One Onesie At a Time: MyConservationBaby

Saving the Planet, One Seed At a Time: various gardening blogs and forums, including this one

Saving the Planet One Job At a Time: CommonGround

Saving the World One Stitch At a Time: Knitting Medic

Saving the Rainforest, One Morsel At a Time: Worldwatch

... and on and on. I also jotted down variations such as "one car at a time," "one flush at a time," "one square of toilet paper at a time," and--because someone had to do it, I guess--"one thong at a time."

If not original, the 360 Vodka snowclone is at least appropriate to the unusual brand story. You could argue that the Stoli snowclone is, too--it has that socialist-realist ring to it, a fitting counterpart to the visual design. Svedka is attempting something different, fashioning a brand that's all about campy futurism--and all attitude and positioning. The antiquated "Make X Not Y" snowclone does communicate campiness, but it's hard to find any futurism there.

Has anyone else spotted snowclones in advertising? Leave a comment and tell us about them.

Big Hulu and Little Lulu

More on the Hulu brouhaha:

The Guardian (UK) reports that self-publishing site Lulu is suing News Corporation and NBC Universal, parents of the Hulu video-sharing venture, for trademark infringement:

Bob Young, the chief executive of Lulu.com, described the branding of the rival Hulu service as a threat to the Lulu franchise and $10m invested in it.

"This is what trademark law is all about," he told MediaGuardian.co.uk.

"But the big problem is that neither of us know where our businesses are going in the future.

"The odds are we'll both end doing something other than what we started out to do.

"It is highly likely that in five years time, 80% of our revenues will come from completely different products and services."

According to the article, Young named Lulu.com "after his pet name for his three daughters, but [the name] is also American slang for a remarkable person or thing." After all three of his daughters? That must be a mistake, or else he has three very confused girls.

Good to know:

[Young] said that Lulu.com has had no commercial issues with other similar domains, such as the site of the pop singer Lulu, because they focus on different business areas.

I say: Hulu, Lulu, Gulu, Mulu, Sulu, Vulu, Xulu, Yulu, Zulu--can't we all just get along?

Hat tip to linguist and news sleuth extraordinaire Ben Zimmer of Language Log and the Oxford University Press blog From A to Zimmer.