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December 07, 2007
More On Insanely Confusing Web 2.0 Names
David Pogue writes about useless Web 2.0 names, ones that no longer make sense, are hard to spell, say and remember.
He notes that, "these days, startups take the lazy way out: they choose goofy-sounding nonsense words. They think they're being clever by being unclever." Then he goes on to list websites that have hit the Web in the last year or so: Doostang. Wufoo. Bliin. Thoof. Bebo. Meebo. Meemo. Kudit. Raketu. Etelos. Oyogi. Qoop. Fark. Kijiji. Zixxo. Zoogmo.
I get new business leads every week that are similar - they all start to blend together after awhile. He says, "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."
He also lists a handful of names that Name Generator (at Dotomator.com) brought up: Cojigo. Roombee. Kwiboo. Trundu. Oobox. Ceelox. Myndo. Ababoo. Vible. Yambo. Eizu. Twimba. Yanoodle. I can pronounce a few of them but try to get me to remember how to spell them!!
I wrote about this earlier this year picking on a handful of vertical search engine names that were so Dr. Seuss jumble-like, that even I, baked into the heart of this business was miffed by.
Of those names, my favorites from the Dr. Seuss jumble include: Ajaxwhois, flickrstorm, FundooWeb, Whonu, similicio.us, KwMap, Mnemomap, Ujiko, Tagnautica, Omgili, and Xcavator.
You get his point.
December 7, 2007 in On Search, On Technology, Social Media, Web 2.0 | Permalink
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Comments
This is all part of the shift from humanoid to android. Most of these names sound like they've been made by and for machines. This shift in language will accompany and abet the transition from flesh/blood to synthetic materials, from HI to AI, and from human condition to cyberempathy. The move from wordpower to image over the last 50 years was an early step, but insufficient for a complete transition. So long as we speak, we need a verbal language that orients us towards our future. Hence these website names.
And/or you could see it as another, and perhaps ultimate, example of the tearing down of art and language in our transitional struggle to find meaning in current culture. Blank canvases, atonal music, non-linear fiction, New Wave cinema, maybe Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky...these are all precursors. By tearing down spoken and written language so that it is not just the narrative that is nonsense, but the words themselves, we can more easily dispense with older definitions of what it is to be human. Hence these names.
Either way, we won't be using hence much longer. English is so 20th century.
Posted by: Ray Lewis | Dec 11, 2007 4:45:41 PM
