What’s In A Name? (Here’s a hint… NOTHING!!!)

On the most recent Media Bullseye podcast, Aaron Brazell (a.k.a. Technosailor) stated “If FriendFeed is going to have adoption (in the) mainstream, there’s going to have to be a name change. FriendFeed sounds tremendously creepy.”

This made me flashback about 10 years. I was reading Jakob Nielsen’s useit.com blog (in the days before we used the word “blog”) wherein he mentioned a new search engine. He described what had started as a university experiment and had evolved into a a new kind of search, where relivance was determined by the number and quality of sites linking into a particular site. This sounded like a great idea, but I didn’t think this search would ever take off because of it’s silly name.

In case you hadn’t guessed, the search site in question was Google.

Google is a silly name, but that name does appear to have been a barrier to its tremendous success. Ditto Yahoo. And Facebook. Facebook?!? There’s a dumb name if there ever was one.

If someone can give me an example of a truly great product or service that has been killed by it’s silly name, I’d love to hear it.

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