Contents:
Would You Give Your First Born To Name Websites Like These?
Some qwerky suggestions for webapps. A bit on the cynical side. I’m sure you can guess which webapps these ones are parodying.
Social Networking
News
School
Entertainment and Sports
Consumer Reviews
- GrumbleUpon
- Ask Questions
Social Bookmarking
Love and Dating
Get the full story here.
Mapping Web 2.0
The serious one shows color-coded regions where the given social networks are popular. I don’t think LiveJournal is comparable to MySpace, but just look at that! Curiously, there’s not one website that dominates equally across continents. According to the article, Hi5 is the most diverse.
The funny one depicts the popular places on the web both as land forms and water forms. Remember, it’s only an approximation!
The mashed up one shows which country made which web application. Not comprehensive, but I’d love to see this when it’s become more comprehensive than ever.
The confusing one lets you navigate through Web 2.0 much like a Tokyo Subway map. (Because unsurprisingly, it’s made by Japanese information architects.) It shows an interesting combination of how successful they predict these webapps will be, as well as other relationships like Chinese-made websites and political blogs.
Don’t forget eBoy’s eCities! (Not exactly maps but they’re the most astounding of all.)
Top 10 Worst Web App Names
Read/WriteWeb has posted a list of the 10 Worst Web App Names.
I don’t particularly with every single one of the ten, but makes for a good laugh.
Mahalo
Jason Calacanis’ secret “Project X” has finally launched and it’s called Mahalo. It’s a human-powered search engine, meaning anyone can supposedly suggest helpful results for search keywords. And if your searches are good enough, you can get paid as a reward.
The interface, despite its pastel/Hawaiian/nature-loving look, seems to behave more like a highly customized wiki (MediaWiki, to be specific) than a search engine, even if this controversial blogger claims he’s got no plans of killing that website format, which, coincidentally, is also named after a Hawaiian word. In fact, the secondary goal of Mahalo is to help fund Wikipedia itself:
…So, you can make the world better 2x: first by making clean, spam- free search results and second by helping keep the Wikipedia running (those server bills ain’t cheap!).
We’ve earmarked up to $250,000 in donations to the Wikipedia this year.
Source: Mahalo Greenhouse Launches
Now that’s pretty kind for someone who declared war against the search engine optimization industry and got called all sorts of colorful names for it.
Web 2.0 Validator Score
5/65
The Formula
Foreign Word
Confirmed Etymology
“thank you”, “(May you be) in (Divine) Breath.”
Belongs to Circle Number
2, The Metaphor
Not to Be Consfused With
PayPerPost, Squidoo
Did You Know…
“…that Mahalo.com is a human-powered search engine whose lead investor Sequoia Capital helped start both Yahoo! and Google?”
Wakoopa
It’s no longer enough that you declare every little thing you’re doing right now. Wakoopa wants you to download an unobtrusive piece of software, track the programs you use, and send that information to their website. Sounds a lot like spyware, right? These days they call it “software gone social”. And I can’t blame them one bit—we love sharing all these little things about ourselves.
It doesn’t stop there. Since Wakoopa is more or less a social network for people who use software, we’ve got groups (”teams”), comments (”reviews”), and of course, our own profile pages where others can discover which media player do we watch those questionable videos with.
The biggest surprise: the name Wakoopa isn’t gibberish! It actually stands for something (I asked).
Imagine if they used their slogan as their name. You’d get SoGoSo!
Web 2.0 Validator Score
10/66
The Formula
Acronymity, Doublized (”We discovered later that we also comply with the “double o” rule of successful companies: just like Google and Yahoo we have “oo” in our name!”)
Confirmed Etymology
W.A.K.O.O.P.A., “Where All Kinds Of Original Progs Appear”
Belongs to Circle Number
4, The Cab Calloway
Also a Great Name For
Donuts
Brownie Points For
The Pink and Green Color Scheme!
Jaiku
If Twitter likens its service to the twittering tweets of a bird, then Jaiku likens its own to, well, haiku. Not that Jaiku is an exact replica of Twitter, though. You can not only micro/nano-blog, you can also add other online presences of yours: blog feeds, Flickr photos, del.icio.us bookmarks, or anything else that carries a feed. (Twitter included!)
Why do Web 2.0 sites have a fondness for Japanese-sounding words?
Score 9/65; Formula: Bastardized Foreign Word (haiku); Circle No.: 2, The Metaphor; Qwerky Rival: Twitter; Qwerky Blog Name: The Jaikido Blog
Twitter
Brevity is the soul of (T)WIT(ter):
Jack gave our acceptance speech which went exactly like this, “We’d like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!”
That’s at the SXSW Web Awards 2007, where Twitter easily won.
Everyone and anyone who’s a blogger should stop whining right this instant about people stalking their blogs. You signed up for MySpace, you have at least one IM screen name, and you might as well podcast or vlog. Twitter takes stalking to the next level. And throws productivity out the window every time you update your sorta’, kinda’ blog about what you’re doing or thinking at the moment. In 140 characters or less.
It feels like Twitter’s going to be the biggest thing since Flickr in terms of “cuteness” and explosion of 3rd-party tools, except that somebody thought of photo-sharing before Flickr did, while Twitter is the first of its kind. Maybe because it’s nine parts silly, 1 part possibly productive.
If YouTube brought about microconsumption of videos, then this is bite-sized vanity blogging.
Score 9/66; Formula: Sound FX (Twitter messages are called Tweets); Circle No.: 2, The Metaphor; Coined Words: Microblogging, Nanoblogging; Biggest Tag in Cloud: nonstop
Fauxto
You’d think online photo editing software are nothing compared to the top guns of Adobe, Corel, and Open Source. You obviously haven’t met Fauxto. It’s got a rich interface with the help of Flash and if you weren’t keen enough you’d think it was the online Photoshop program Adobe has announced.
There’s nothing “fake” about being able to edit “faux”-tos and more—all online. It’s possible now.
Score 9/66; Formula: Bastardized English (faux, photo); Circle No.: 3, The Pseudo-Abstract; Qwerky Rival: PXN8
Google, DoubleClick, $3.1 Billion.
Guess which bought which. Easy.
Qwerky Redesign!
Here’s a new look for Qwerky after more than a year of blogging about weird Web 2.0 names. Come to think of it, I didn’t exactly celebrate this blog’s first anniversary (which is January 14th), unlike what I did with Stellify.net.
Some statistics according to the archives page:
There are currently 99 posts and 199 comments, contained within 3 categories.
I know the colors are loud, but I’m a fan of the combination and I’m glad I found a place to use it. The 2.0 denotes “version 2.0″ and, of course, “Web 2.0″! Hope you like it. If you have any comments or suggestions, let me know!
