I may have mentioned that I have partaken of the Google Kool-Aid. (BTW part of getting older is the annoyingly ever-present sense of deja vu one feels when bringing up practically any topic. You find yourself prefacing virtually every sentence with 'I may have mentioned' or 'Was it you I was telling' to soften the awkwardness of being told, 'yes, you already told me that'. It's a dementia preemptive strike. The logic goes like this: I can't have dementia if I'm aware that it may seem that I have dementia and forgot I already told you this twenty minutes ago. Flawed Logic Alert: so somehow it is better that you freely admit you can't remember if you already told someone something?)
But I digress.
I am pretty sure I mentioned this Google thing to you earlier, and one of the many reasons I am fond of it/them is the name. 'Google' is, I think, one of the first Internet-related made up words and IMO without doubt the best. It has a carefree air, is easy to spell and remember, and has been joyfully embraced by all. As it caught on, Mad Men everywhere breathed a huge sigh of relief that they could abandon the frustrating search for unique preexisting words and instead turn their ever so creative minds to, well, creating. Never again would we have to put up with half-assed, uninspiring names. Yes, Kia Sportage, I am talking to you.
So how is that working out for you, tech industry? I'll tell you how: not so good. With the explosion of millions of internet-related doohickeys, the fun and cool made-up names evaporated like camel piss on the Sahara. Instead of the Googles and Diggs and Reddits, we are now stuck with a bunch of non-words that not only have no meaning, they do not carry their marketing weight. We couldn't remember them, much less spell them in order to retype their home URL, if our life depended on it.
What brings this to mind is a recent convo I had with my daughter. She was recommending a new fitness app to me. Really liked it, cool GPS features to help you figure out how far your ran or biked that day, etc. What's not to like? I'll tell you what: the name. It's www.strava.com. What exactly is a strava? Is it someone's initials? Some sort of exotic African wildlife? The first, middle and last portions of the names/breeds/colors of the founders' purse pooches? The menu item served when the venture capital deal was clinched? Their favorite bike part/jelly bean flavor/middle school crush? You haters out there are probably thinking, well yeah but what is a 'Google'? I'll tell you what it is: it has grown beyond all doubt and question into its own thing, completely impervious to your haters' hateful hating. Aww, just kidding - spoiler alert - Google haters are right up there with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and a balanced national budget as one of the greatest myths of the modern age.
Mind you, I am not talking about domains that co-opt an existing word that has little or no relation to the domain content other than someone just liked the word (Yahoo), or those that have cleverly combined words and letters in a new way (Pinterest) or dropped silent or otherwise extraneous letters a la text message (Flickr). No, I am ranting about words that, until somebody paid the fee to GoDaddy, had ABSOLUTELY NO MEANING. AT ALL. Do you think a bunch of Stanford engineering grads sat around brainstorming these, or some former Papa John's employees just followed a two-year-old around and tried to reproduce every sound they made? I'll let the evidence do the talking. In order from bad to worst:
mozilla - I have been fooling about with computers for so long, I actually remember Mozilla from the bad ol' days of cassette tapes and floppy disks. This one gets a pass for sentimental reasons.
squidoo - actually kinda cute, puts me in mind of an adorable sea creature and its not-so-adorable bodily functions.
squurl - this one is included as it perfectly represents my bias against those who cannot be troubled to learn how to spell.
jamendo and jango - these are both music sites. One is semi-catchy. One fails. Which is which? I'll let you decide.
qz - science nerds running amok playing Esoteric Hipster, dangerously close to mystifying their intended audience. Yeah, I had to look it up.
imgur - yeah I get it but they are taking the phonetic thing a little too far, dontcha think? See squurl. And yes by using dontcha I am being ironic.
dord - this one is not a domain name yet, but if you want to use it, it has a cool pedigree.
meebo - the name wasn't bad enough to keep Google from buying it.
erowid - this is a semi-real word but a) no regular person knows wtf it means and b) my brain keeps wanting to translate it to 'earwig' - eewwww!!
tweewoo - another music site. Folks shoulda put down the bong before they registered this one. I refuse to patronize any site that makes me sound like Elmer Fudd while pronouncing it.
fffff.at - these people have clearly just given up on finding a unique domain name. Isn't this the sound you make to approximate air being let out of a balloon?
Apparently there are websites out there that contribute to this debacle. Their clever algorithms will generate scores of unique yet meaningless domain names. Not to be outdone by a few lines of code, I'd like to take a crack at it. How about these? I even have some ideas for target markets.
foozl - perfect as a dating site for dyslexic court jesters
zaxunz - European police siren repair
klaq - speech pathology site for domesticated water fowl
baahrf - I totally see this working for one of those sites that tells college students where the good parties are
Good news: my hypothesis was correct. No pricey algorithms necessary to generate the perfectly unique domain name. Just grab your Scrabble tiles (the real ones, not the app version), find a human 24 months or younger, and spell out the sounds they make (regardless of orifice). Piece of cake.
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