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Monday, January 4, 2010

10 Best and Worst Internet Company Names of the Decade

An article at MarketingProfs.com recently discussed the 10 biggest dot-com naming trends.

These clever trends range from The Hookup, in which two words are linked together to create a whole new word and add it to our vernacular (Think YouTube, which was the winner, and TalkShoe, which was a sad, play-on-accent loser), to The Misspeller (Boku, a phonetic take on the French word beaucoup, won this race, and Cuil- do we really need another way to spell "cool?"- came in last place).

Photo sharing site Flickr came in first for The Letter-Dropper trend, and iStalkr, last. A bit intrigued by this creepy dot-com, I looked it up. This a tool that allows you to "stalk" those who subscribe to the same feeds as you do (Digg, YouTube, Flickr, etc), and vice versa. In essence, you see what they are reading and they you.

True it is an ill-conceived name, but I am more struck by the idea that someone out there believes we need yet another way to connect with each other. As we begin to have more of a relationship with our computers and our favored websites and articles (and therefore I posit less of a relationship with our human companions), we are inventing more ways to interact without actually interacting. Have the water cooler discussion, just not by the water cooler. One could propose that we are becoming more e-articulate, but less conversationally so. Or perhaps we are intrinsic cataloguers. All this from a site that isn't doing well and is poorly named.

In any case, 10 Best and Worst Internet Company Names of the Decade gives you pause. Every one of the "best" I do use, have used or at the very least have heard of. Of the "worst," only a couple have ever made it across my computer screen. Their bad names in consideration, it is also their function that has doomed them. Most of them are something I just don't have use for.

So here are a few questions to consider-

What companies have come before and what will come after? Will people get the name? What relevance does it carry? Is there any weight to it?

That being said, I still want dibs on bomb.com.

Labels: branding, Web