What happened to the good ol’ days of MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and LiveJournal? Remember those happier times? When the name of a site indicated what it was? From there it started to get a little rid.iculo.us (I checked, and that URL currently isn’t a site, so we’re safe…for now…): there’s Etsy, Wazima, Darmik, Django (was his name-o?), Mochikit, Zoto…they all sound like characters from The Dark Crystal. Or like Scientology overlords.
I get the whole “Web 2.0 Sexy Explosion! Strike while the iron’s hot!” mentality, but what separates the Woozles from the Wazzles from the Kreblaks from the Zoomubys from the Noonoos? (Yes, I made all of those words up.) It seems like young entrepreneurs caught wind of the notion that if you create a company and give it a weird name and launch it during the Web 2.0 craze, you’re bound to become a household name, regardless if you have a means to monetize it; hence, Jane has a list of a bazillion sites to go through for the Web 2.0 Awards, who all think they can get away with offering a crap service because their name is hip and clever.
As Syndrome put it in The Incredibles, “When everyone’s special…no one is.”
