Looks like George Lucas has a rival for nonsensical quasi-mystical gubbins: as this quiz points out, the proliferation of word-mangling web 2.0 names runs Star Wars a close second for ‘bad hand at Scrabble’ type nonsense. I’m not sure if there ever was a time when there were such things as ‘Photo Sharing Website’, ‘Dating Site’ or ‘The Social Network / Spying on your Friends / Acquaintances Website’, but I wouldn’t half like to see this kind of plain speaking used when people name their next net venture. Trying to negotiate the punch-drunk lexicon of the web 2.0 world is like stumbling upon an abandoned trial version of the Esperanto dictionary. Far be it for me to say, but whoever it was that came up with likes of Yubnub, Pheedo and Xuqa needs a sound whack across the temples with a hard-bound copy of the OED. Failing that, this could be a good solution the next time someone decides that ‘WangDangDoodle’ or ‘Grgsta’ is a suitable name for their bookmarking site:
If I scored 74% does that make me
a) a bit sad
b) not quite sad enough to be impressive
I scored around the same and I think it would have been near impossible to be male and 20+ without having at least a working knowledge of Star Wars, so I’d add myself as c) more Wookiee than Facebooky.
Is 84% sad enough to be impressive? I think the test has backfired somewhat; I now want to start a web 2.0 site and call it ‘dooku’ (sorry Andrew – though you can rest assured I don’t have the technical skill). It’s also interesting in that most of the ones I recognise are the Star Wars ones – some of the web 2.0 ones clearly have more promotional work to do…
…or maybe there are so many -oogle, -sta, -ka and -ku style names that they just don’t stick out any more? Once something starts to shift into the realm of self parody then it’s probably time to stop and do something else. I do wonder sometimes if the focus groups that come up with site names involve the head of marketing donning a suit of armour and rolling around in a pile of alphabet fridge magnets until a suitably ‘-oogley’ combination of letters sticks to them.