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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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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