Call it the redundancy of crowds. A few years ago, all the cool startups wanted baby-talk names: Meemo, Meebo, Bebo, ooVoo, Kwout, YooGuu, Doof, Thoof. Not in 2011: this is the year of naming adverbially. Some of the adverbish domains use the Libyan country code, .ly; others are .coms that incorporate –ly into their names. There are a lot of them, and what may have seemed like a clever idea at first—verbs! action! it’s how we do stuff!—is looking like a sad insufficiency of imagination.
The curious thing about naming trends is that none of the responsible parties ever thinks his name is a trend-follower. Oh no, every name is a true original! And ours is the best! Sure enough, when I singled out a few –ly names on Twitter, I got copycat responses: “But our name is cute!” “At least __ly has a double meaning!” “__ly is a great name! And we are dot com, not dot ly!” Sigh.
If you’re considering an –ly name for your new business, perhaps this list of 27 –ly names will convince you that it’s not very distinctive after all. By the way, I’ve omitted the –ly names already at the bottom of the dead pool: Slantly, Quotably, Smak.ly, Seriesly, et al.
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Adly pairs advertisers with celebrities who use Twitter.
Ambiently says (clumsily) that it “semantically connects webpages of similar or related meanings together.”
Bit.ly is a URL shortener.
Brizzly is a reader for Twitter and Facebook. The company’s mascot is a cartoon bear, so I’m guessing the name has something to do with “grizzly.”
Chirply is a “crowd-sourced and crowd-curated design community for paper goods” such as greeting cards and wrapping paper (according to TechCrunch).
Creately does online diagramming and collaboration.
Estately is a home-listings website.
Farm.ly sends alerts to FarmVille users (players? growers?), telling them when it’s time to harvest their “crops.”
FounderLY is “committed to promoting entrepreneurship by way of sharing startup founder stories.”
Fuelly lets you “share and compare your MPG.”
Letter.ly (also Letterly.net) is “the simple way to publish email subscription newsletters.” The company got into trouble earlier this year with the Libyan government when it neglected to renew its .ly domain. (.ly is the country code of Libya.)
Ow.ly is another a link shortener.
Planely connects you with people on your flight who are registered with Planely.
Postcardly “turns your emails into real-life postcards, delivered by U.S. mail.” (Will this be the service that saves the U.S. Postal Service? Yeah, fat chance.)
Scheduly does online appointment scheduling.
Score.ly is “the only free way to showcase online milestones and legitimate real world achievements.”
Shoply is “the social shopping marketplace.”
Smel.ly is “the minimal complaint toolkit.” Log in to Twitter to vent.
Snapily is “a cool new way to affix your pix to customized greeting cards, business cards, notebooks, and more.”
Startuply publishes job listings for startup companies.
Tatt.ly sells “designy temporary tattoos.” The company was launched last month by designer Tina Roth Eisenberg of Swiss Miss.
Teamly is “a tool used by hundreds of businesses and thousands of individuals to improve their performance in the workplace.”
Todo.ly is an online to-do list and task manager. “To-do list” suggests one pronunciation of Todo.ly, but I can’t say for sure whether it’s meant to sound more like “totally.”
Twingly is “a powerful group communication and microblogging tool in the era of the realtime web.” From the spelling, you’d think it was a Twitter app, but it isn’t: it’s a rival service.
Twitly is a Twitter app for organizing the people you follow into groups. (Possibly defunct.)
Visual.ly is a site for designing, sharing, and promoting infographics.
Weebly is a do-it-yourself website builder. Not related to Weebles, the children’s toys that “wobble but they don’t fall down.”
UPDATE, Aug. 24: It’s been less than a week and there are already two new -lys on the block: Forkly is an iPhone app that “shows you where to go and what's tasty there.” And Erply has nothing to with gastric distress: It's a provider of customized ERP (enterprise resource planning) “solutions.”
My investigation did unearth one –ly name that’s interesting, distinctive, and authentic: Doorly. No, it’s not a door manufacturer; it’s the personal website of one Sean Doorly, who kindly provides some background about his surname:
The Irish surname Doorly is the Anglicization of the Old Gaelic surname O’Doghair [!], which is a surname belonging chiefly to counties Kerry, Limerick and South Tipperary. The name was not anglicized until the seventeenth century when there was a recommendation by the British authorities that all be names be written in English, so as to make registration easier. This surname can be traced to a powerful French family who settled in Ireland during the tenth century. They were the Dore sept, whose names was of local origin, deriving from the name of the dwelling place or locality where a bearer once lived.
Read some other posts about naming trends and redundancy: Hi-yo, I-O!, The Fffff Words, Nomics, The Q Factor, The Tastiest Suffix (“-licious”), and X+Y names in retail and in restaurants.
I dislike these. Intensely.
Posted by: Jessica | August 18, 2011 at 08:56 AM
Another "nomics" firm: Auctionomics. Stanford offshoot born 2006-7, perhaps slightly more deserving of the suffix given its purview and the rumored Nobel candidate (Paul Milgrom) on the company masthead. Maker of custom software solutions for complex auctions.
Posted by: Jesse | August 19, 2011 at 12:01 PM
I don't know if you have timelines for these, but my unscientific guess is that bit.ly has been around longer than many of these. I further guess that their interest in the .ly domain is not _just_ the grammatical possibilities, but the fact that that's as short a domain name as you can get, and of course bit.ly is all about short names. (?)
Posted by: mike | August 22, 2011 at 08:11 AM
Basing a business identity in a country that criminalizes speech — what could possibly go wrong?
The same is true for India and its .IN domains, which place users (not just domain owners) at risk of criminal penalties for activities that are not considered crimes in the United States.
Posted by: Aem76us | September 13, 2011 at 05:25 PM