3 Rules For Naming Your Internet Company

I seriously thought this headline on GigaOm was a joke: "Update: Like Gaboogie, Foonz Losing Its Voice Too." It turns out Goboogie is changing its name to Lypp, while the Foonz team will be focusing on Utterz.

This has to stop.

Here are 8 rules for naming your internet company.

1. Use real words.
   The companies I've worked with over the last few years all follow this rule: rubyredlabs.com, valleyschwag.com, getsatisfaction.com, pivotallabs.com, 17feet.com. (The first two were named by Thor, but under our Lennon/McCartney agreement we shared credit for all concepts. We're still arguing over who gets to be John.) Of course, it would have been nice to get "Rubyred.com" or "Satisfaction.com" but of course they were taken. Still, I think it's better to have a long name with multiple real words that a short name that is unpronounceable and stupid.
   
   
2. Forget about ".com".
   This is the hardest one for most people, and the main reason I'm writing this post. We are simply out of dot com names, and we need to start using some other TLD's. Specifically, I think we need to make ".TV" cool, and this will happen by having some successful companies with .TV names. If YouTube.com had been Youtube.tv there would be no stigma attached to .TV domains, and we would all be buying our names using the auction process (which I'll get to in a minute) and domain piracy would go away, as would Lypp and Utterz.
   
   
3. Buy a premium .TV domain using the official process.
   I'll assume you're naming a video sharing company, since we need 3000 more of those. Here's a secret: when they created .tv, Network Solutions pre-registered every real word domain name and now they're selling them for profit, anywhere from $100/yr for 0124.tv to $500,000/yr for business.tv. When I first heard this I thought it sucked, but after a few minutes of browsing the domain list I changed my mind. Why? For $1000 I could get "whatever.tv" or "taco.tv", both of which are way better than gaboogie.com. If the company is doing well then $1000 a year shouldn't be a problem, and if it fails then the domain goes back into the pool to be leased by another legitimate company.

Beach Boys recordings recunstructed as live performances

A few of my old friends, including my original design mentor Tony Rose (of digitalwave.com), have been working on a cool project over the past few years. It's called Back to the Beach Boys, and the basic concept is to reconstruct Beach Boys recordings as live performances. From the website:

No details were spared to recreate the sounds of the original recordings. Using period correct instruments, the music featured everything from marimbas and accordians to horns and strings...the keyboardist even built what is most likely the only exact replica of Paul Tanner's electro-Theremin that he played on the original “Good Vibrations”...and many of your favorite sci-fi movies!

So if the recording has 5 beach boys singing 3 parts each they need 15 singers to do it live, and if a 1963 Fender guitar played 2 parts and was redoubled in the recording session they need 4 1963 Fender guitars. You get the picture.

Check them out playing Little Saint Nick in somebody's livingroom.