[...] 06-11-2007 Web 2.0 Names are Hard, Raph Kosters. [...]

“The strange thing is of course that most of the good companies come about this way..”

You quite obviously have not been to many SF web 2.0 networking parties the conversation goes somthing like this:

hip SF web20h guy: “so what does GameMarketMetrics do?”
Me (uncool web1oH guy): “we measure video game consumer data”
hip guy: “oh, that names really um…”old school” you need something cooler”
Me: “Ok well so what your company um…what is that Yoobeuo (made this up)do?
hip guy: “We arrgregate wisdom of crowds a using customizable distributable platforms to help people make decisions and liveblog to thier social neural network”
Me: “so you make widgets people can customize?”
hip guy: “well yeah kinda..but its cooler than that..”

I wont even get into how the monetization and business plans conversations go, the problem is most of these kids are looking for 2 things: easy VC cash, and a quick flip of the company. Most of them are not concerned or could care less about building something of value, a product, or a long term solution, or for that matter a relavent company.

I stopped going to web 2.0 events about 3 months ago. Prolonged exposure to irrational exhuberence starts to make you question peoples sanity.

[...] Re: the e: http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/04/17/web-20-names-are-hard/ [...]

The strange thing is of course that most of the good companies come about this way and having a “good” domain name is slowly but surely becoming somewhat fishy. I wonder if Fog Creek are still glad they paid all that money for copilot.com instead of just calling it ipsindodo.com or something similar.

I liked my approach of stringing two words everyone knows together to get a spellable, prononceable name. But shorter nonsense words seem to be more popular (mebo, flickr, odeo, etc. etc.)

[...] Koster says that Web 2.0 names are hard: Here I am walking around the show floor at Web 2.0 Expo, and I guess every possible combination of [...]