Twitter sounded like a dumb name too, but they kept it and now nobody thinks twice about it. (Can you imagine: "Twit means idiot, nobody will use this service because of that!") Most creative names sound dumb until they stick around long enough.
Is it, though? I mean, yeah, it's no Google or Bing or Yahoo, but it also doesn't have Google or Microsoft or Yahoo money, either.
It's on the brink of breaking 1% in the US [1]; that might seem small, but that'd be a good 33% of ChromeOS users or 10% of macOS users. Not bad, considering.
And really, blaming DuckDuckGo's branding for its poor marketshare is pretty ridiculous given the competition. I mean come on, what kind of a name is "Google"? Or "Bing"? Or "Yahoo"? The ridiculousness of the branding doesn't seem to actually be a problem, since that's actually constant across all of the top four browsers in the US.
[1]: http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/uni...
[2]: http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/united-states-...
Search engines are a mature market. You're not going to displace Google unless you manage to disrupt the entire industry somehow; social tried and failed at this, so it's not clear what this would even mean at present.
As a challenger in a mature market, DDG has the right strategy, and they are playing their hand successfully. I seriously doubt that branding is holding them back.
Nothing's stopping someone from using it and at the same time thinking it has a poor name.
But anyway, what the current users think of it is hardly a sign in favour of the name, because that user base doesn't seem very big for a tool whose value largely comes from the size of its network of users.
The relevant question is how the name comes across to the average potential user.
Mastodon = extinct elephant-like mammal
This is why successful companies hire marketers.
Having been in the room when working on branding, there's always plausible objections unless the brand is completely anodyne, and by extension terminally forgettable. At the end of the day you just have to go with something that isn't terrible.
And it’s not just the names — look at their logos.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ARC%27TERYX_logo.svg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mammut_logo.jpg
The first one is straight up the fossil skeleton of the animal they based their name on! If that doesn’t spell extinction I don’t know what does.
These two companies make jackets, climbing harnesses, trekking shoes, backpacks and more.
I doubt that either of these two that I mentioned have been negatively impacted by the fact the animals they have based their names and logos on are extinct.
(My personal opinion is that it makes them cooler even — the prehistoric times and the animals that used to roam the earth are very fascinating to me. And I think a lot of people agree. Look for example at how popular the Jurrasic Park movies were. People love this stuff, don’t they?)
"Tweet" reminds people of birds. As in "a little bird told me". Which is appropriate for a gossip style network.
Breaking news. In a series of explosive toots...
The foreign minister was forced to resign after a number of offensive toots...
OMG, your toots are so funny!...
Everyone's talking about what J K Rowling tooted today...
I can't believe you tooted that!...
...and so on
If you think I'm joking then that shows how bad a name "toot" is. Because these are all phrases that people would say about tweets, and which need to sound non-ridiculous for any such system.
It's difficult to show evidence for the absence of something, though.
It'd be possible to show evidence of it, like that every time the word "tweet" was brought up the were people saying it sounded ridiculous and embarrassing.
But then with Toot, obviously that wasn't what they were going for. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Mastodon seriously needs a rebrand.
I think it would be pretty darn easy to maintain a rebranded fork, though.
In addition, it's time to drop the notion that every platform has to serve every type of user. As demonstrated by the problems facing Twitter, it is probably better to have many different platforms serving different audiences. Mass media inevitably reaches for the lowest common denominator.
> Breaking news. In a series of explosive toots...
> The foreign minister was forced to resign after a number of offensive toots...
> Everyone's talking about what J K Rowling tooted today...
If the age of tweet-reporting ends because of "toots" then I am all for it. As for your other examples, you have a decent point.
> OMG, your toots are so funny!...
> I can't believe you tooted that!...
I can see how this might feel weird for some people, at least in the English-speaking world. But people thought "tweeting" was ridiculous, and they made fun of it relentlessly. In the end it doesn't matter all that much.
I don't think the terms "tweeting" and "tooting" are in the same ballpark in terms of how ridiculous they sound to people.
> In the end it doesn't matter all that much.
But naming does matter, which is why companies spend huge sums on it each year.
(Btw I removed those examples from my earlier comment as I felt they weren't relevant to the topic we were originally discussing, which was the name Madstodon)
More seriously, the American Heritage Dictionary gives the following definition:
v.
To sound a horn or whistle in short blasts.
v.
To make the sound of a horn or whistle blown in short blasts or a sound resembling it.
v.
Slang To snort cocaine.
If CockroachDB was being sold to the average person, it'd be an awful name from a branding perspective.
In reality, it's being sold to nerds who probably aren't as off-put by the name and are more interested in what it does as a database. To hit the point home, the database is designed with resilience in mind, just like actual cockroaches!
For something being marketed to the masses, Mastodon isn't great branding. Nobody thinks of Mastodons when thinking of any form of communication, but we all hear birds tweeting every day and have been used in real life to send messages. When asking people to think of something "cute", nobody is going to say "a mastodon". The term "tweet" is considered cute and inoffensive. But "toot"? Most people I know associate that word with flatulence.
Maybe the use of the word "toot" is an subtle admission that most of what people will say on social media is basically shit?
I'm sorry, but nerdy programmers who work on open source are terrible at marketing and have been so since time immemorial. If they could have simply named their software better, they might have had a shot at a "Year of the Linux Desktop". It's like they forget that most people aren't geeks, and then they wonder why the general public doesn't [knowingly] use any of their stuff.
This seems like backwards reasoning. If you named a new platform after pigeons, which were actually used for transmitting information, you'd get critics saying "It's so archaic, nobody has used pigeons for 80 years!" Birds carrying messages is just as "extinct" of a metaphor as Mastodons are as an animal.
Every single popular service today has an utterly awful name. It did not stop them.
Like what? I can't think of any bad ones that people use on a regular basis.
You are USED to them, so they don't sound stupid. If you heard them for the first time, they'd sound utterly stupid.
Someone recommended finding evidence of people complaining about names back when these services first came out. I don't recall ever thinking any of these names were stupid, despite other issues I had with the services.