As a meaningless name, meebo.com does have a certain ‘feel’ about it that seems appropriate for its function.  The service was started as one of the founders had a problem remembering their 13 instant messenger accounts. Meebo aggregates your messenger accounts in one place, so you can be super-connected. Yep. Meeee! It’s all about Meeeee! bo.To give them credit, they were fairly early-wave in their adoption of a silly name, and are shamelessly upfront about it.

http://www.meebo.com/history/ contains a whole section called “why the name meebo?” that runs to an amazing 4 paragraphs.  The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

The tl;dr of the rambling excuse is literally TDCWA:

“They came up with about fifty… entered all fifty names, one by one, into a browser…the rest were taken…they picked Meebo and voilà!”

I did in fact give this service a go once, but using it for my single lowly icq number seemed a bit of a waste. Their subsequent success at shoehorning a decidedly desktop-app based service (IM) into a shiny webapp that breaks the Alexa 500 means I’m going to give them a break on their name choice. I mean really, what would you have called it.  AllYourIMAccountsAreBelongToUs.com?

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The latest trend has been away from the dotcom arena. So complete was the pillage of the .com TLD, with every single LLLL.com either used for some silly named website or hoarded by domainers, that the scorched earth policy has moved to ‘unconventional’ TLDs.

You could be forgiven for thinking people might just move to the other ‘main’ top levels, such as .net or .org.  A few did, but this always has the issue of “who’s sitting on my dotcom, and what will they do when legions of muppets mistype my site, assuming that all websites are ‘dotcoms’”.  So, with one of the earliest being the patriotically chosen ‘del.icio.us‘, the exodus began.  Note: delicious’ terrible misuse of subdomain as well as smug use of TLD paid off, but they still bought delicious.com as soon as they could afford it.  It’s not really early adopters this site is poking fun at, but the metoos.

So we come to chi.mp – what appears to be a clearinghouse for the self-promoting, rabidly egotistical, iphone using social network twitterati (see also flavors.us). Due to its temptimg gimmick of giving out ‘.mp’ domains for free *(the TLD for the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands), all these folk will have their own tedious page for their trenchant observations on life. Or lattes, whatever.  A side-effect of this will be the inevitable swarm of civil servants creating sites for wannabe-hip Members of Parliament (no surprise that the first one I checked borisjohnson.mp has the inane twitterings of the Donald Trump lookalike London Mayor already there)

So what could have been an interesting Jane Goodall fansite will surely end up just with a bunch of monkeys flinging poo at each other.

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One of the more recent catalysts to start this site, and so receiving the dubious honour of being the first post is kijiji.com. When I first saw kijiji.com ads online I assumed it was an horribly misguided startup living in 2001 throwing their money away on a badly branded craigslist clone. I was basically right, except the year was 2008 and the startup was in fact eBay.com

Now kijiji (no capitals here folks) has proven two things.

1) Unreadable unpronounceable domains using Swahili [seriously - it means 'village' supposedly] terms as their name can grab market share.

2) 1. is only possible if a site like eBay throws 10s of Millions of $$$ at branding a blatant craiglist knockoff by buying every keyword under the sun for a period of months.

An entertaining corollary to this is that the name was clearly considered too weird for the Asian subcontinent, and thus Kijiji India is now a classic TDCWA – quikr.com (no ‘c’, no ‘e’)

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This site arose out of the countless times I’ve seen a domain and thought “What the hell is that name supposed to mean. What do they do?”.

You know the type. Jafoodle. Smingler. Wajibbit.  Tells you nothing of the purpose of the site, and doesn’t even have any obvious etymology. The only reason you can fathom is that after the dotcom rush of the late 90s, all the ‘pets.com‘ type domains had gone, nobody likes unmemorablylongdescriptivedomains.com, and so they generate a random string of pronounceable letters and head off to whois. That’s right – basing your whole company name on the fact that The Dot Com Was Available.

Nobody stopped to question why Fshng.com* might not have been snapped up, and so we started telling our friends about sites we couldn’t even pronounce

Now, early on this was considered a clever ploy, and many still popular sites rode high on this wave of gibberish.  Flickr, Digg, hell, even eBay’s pretty meaningless. This sadly only encouraged a rush of poor fools dropping vowels from common words and finding WOW – TDCWA!  Sure. Nobody stopped to question why Fshng.com* might not have been snapped up, and so we started telling our friends about sites we couldn’t even pronounce without sounding like we had a mouth full of cotton wool.

In reading this site you might learn various things. They may include insights into poor management judgement, what LLLL means, and who Yun Ye, Kevin Ham, Rick Schwartz and Frank Schilling are, and why they won’t let you have sensibly named websites.  Then again, you may just get a chuckle at some of the weirder choices people make when branching out in the www.

So here we are. This is a lighthearted (read: don’t sue me) trip through the weird and wonderful world of domains.

*Note: At time of writing fshng.com is still available. Go ahead – snap it up and make your fortune from legions of dyslexic anglers

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