Meemo. Qoosa. Xobni. Thoof. Lala. Wufoo. Kijiji. Zoogmo.Wixi. Wakoopa. Qosimo. Hulu.
Such is the sorry state of company naming these days. Tech company after tech company is slipping into a bulging diaper of infantilism by taking a snippet of baby talk as its brand name.
Why? Because the dotcom domain name was available.
The trend is reaching critical mass. We are assailed by so many nonsense brand names that they have become another burble to our oversaturated, overmarketed brains. Individually, the names are gibberish. Collectively, they are white noise.
To understand how we have come to this point–and more importantly, to understand where domain naming will go from here–it’s important to see where we’ve been.
In the beginning IEEE and Al Gore created the Internet, and it was good. When corporations realized just how good the Web could be for business, they acquired domains and named them after their company: ibm.com, hp.com, apple.com, microsoft.com. At that time were only three generic TLD’s (top level domains) available: .com for commercial entities, .net for network infrastructures, and .org for noncommercial organizations.
In addition to the brick and mortar companies establishing their Web presence, the Internet was inundated by enterprising companies looking for a way to monetize this great new thing. Some of them were pretty good at branding and chose a decent company name, which was also their domain name: Amazon.com, PayPal.com, Travelocity.com.
Others saw dollar signs in grabbing up generic domain names: pets.com, etoys.com, freeinternet.com.
More in Pt 2.
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