The net has been about too long for people to be able to get the domain names they want. Everything in the dictionary has long been registered.
The best names are
Short
Memorable
Unique (it’s kinda handy when searching for your own name on google and knowing that every reference to monkeyspokz exists because of your site.)
Hence all these web 2.0 start-ups have to play about with misspelling ordinary words.
Examples
Flickr - Remove the last vowel
Digg - Double up the final consonant
Vimeo - Replacing a middle consonant to possibly do a joke on ‘putting the me in video’
Zooomr - oo = ooo AND removing the last vowel. This is just taking the piss.
Del.icio.us - Abusing TLDs to create words. Personally I think this is a bit sh.it
Possible future trends?
Ck = q - Fliqr, Fuqr, nicewheatherforduqs
3 = e - Well, we did it on B3ta 5 years ago. Maybe it’ll catch on eventually.
Er… Reallyreallylongnamesthatbuckthetrend?
Anyway. I’ve dashed out a quick Web 2.0 Namr to illustrate some of these points. Rah.
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May 10th, 2006 at 8:09 pm
You’ve inspired me. A new personal goal is to make everyone I know call Flickr ‘Fliqueur’.
May 11th, 2006 at 4:15 am
I know you’re taking the piss but that’s actually a really useful tool. No, really.
How about a similar tool which takes a random colour and links it with a random noun? “pinkoctopus”, “purpletesticle”, “aquataxi”, etc.
May 11th, 2006 at 12:57 pm
Who wants rights on “purpl3test1cle.c0m”?
May 12th, 2006 at 1:56 pm
How about a filter that looks for possible suffixes, say if the word ends in net, conveniently have a ‘net site
or something (i know you havent done this cause i typed in “cocknet” to check, cockn3tr is my new website btw)
May 12th, 2006 at 5:07 pm
You will probably enjoy this:
http://www.cerado.com/web20quiz.htm
a test to see if you can tell the difference between web 2.0 company names and star wars characters. It’s fun!
May 14th, 2006 at 7:00 pm
You missed a trend: if the word ends in a vowel, just leave it off… e.g. weeble becomes weebl
May 17th, 2006 at 5:21 am
Like your suggestion for abused TLDs, a few years ago I registered ‘ug’ in Italy’s Bologna district: ug.bo.it
WTF??? I here you say.
Well, my name is Doug Boit so I thought having my e-mail address as d@ug.bo.it might be cool. It wasn’t. Faxes to chambers of commerce, spam, email delayed by 2 days… Bah!. You were right, it was sh.it.
May 19th, 2006 at 6:56 am
I went for the colour and animal route, hence NEONDOG.
Nowadays I’d be tempted for d0gsh1tt3r or b3anfl1ck3r.
August 1st, 2006 at 12:05 pm
I’ve got www.youtw.at