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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