Aplus.net Blog

Writing in today’s Washington Post, Mr. Paul Farhi brings up an interesting point about many of the companies that currently dominate the online business world. To paraphrase: Some of these new company names are getting pretty crazy.

Among the many things the Internet has added recently to contemporary life, there is this: Many grown-ups now sound like babbling toddlers when speaking about the digital world — because many corporate names now have the ring of a collection of Dr. Seuss characters.

Friends tell friends about the hot new videos on Bebo and Joost, or Hulu and Revver. They buy movie tickets on Fandango, trade songs on Kazaa and find amusing news items on Fark. Zug is a comedy site, Yelp is a review site, Woozyfly a music-sharing site. Zune? Not a Web site at all, but rather a music player.

There’s Miva (for searches and contextual ads) and Apahcinc (another search engine), Tucows (business-to-business advertising) and Babooshnik (games). There’s Furl.net and Spurl.net, and if you don’t know what they do, you can ask Skaffe or Sporge to help you find that information.

This is something that folks in the younger generation take for granted. For kids who grew up on Napster and iTunes, the names KaZaa and Zune don’t even raise an eyebrow. But for those people who grew up with General Motors and IBM? It certainly must take some getting used to.

So why the rampant cuteness? Is the idea to make tech-related companies feel warm and fuzzy and not so sterile and impersonal?

Many tech companies tend to follow two naming strategies these days, says Anthony Shore, global director of naming and writing at Landor Associates, a San Francisco design company: the “nonsense” name (Joost) and names that use familiar-but-misspelled words (Flickr).

Shore, for one, likes neither strategy: “It just feels like they’re throwing in the towel. It’s easy to find an existing word and drop out a letter. It’s easy to come up with arbitrary sounds, or to just add an ‘oo.’ It’s far more difficult to come up with names with real words that have meanings and connections with people.”

It’s definitely an interesting read. Check it out here.