Pick your start-up name
05.02.2008 20:25
On Monday we had some discussion at Zemanta about naming strategies of popular internet services and startups. That got me thinking and I've hacked up a start-up name generator. I'm obviously not the first one with that idea.
Anyway, it's a simple Perl script using a probabilistic model of Web 2.0 namespace (which I made up on the spot). Given that it took me 15 minutes to write it it's surprisingly effective and produces approximately one useful name out of 140. Useful meaning that someone with a lot of imagination might use it to name something.
Even more surprising is that out of those more or less randomly generated names more than 30% are already registered as .com domains. So in a rough estimate if there are approximately 1010 alphabetic names with between 4 and 7 characters that means 3 billion registered domain names. Amazing.
If you're going to launch a web service, you better do it soon.
