- Spotify's actual name on Google Play is "Spotify: Discover music, podcasts, and playlists" (so catchy!)

- SoundHound's actual name is "SoundHound - Music Discovery & Hands-Free Player"

Rather than fixing whatever search behaviour incentivised this, Google seem to have just joined in;

- Google Maps is actually called "Maps - Navigate & Explore"

- Google Keep is actually called "Google Keep - Notes and Lists"

When I got a new phone recently I actually found it really confusing and had to check I wasn't installing phishing apps by mistake.

Thankfully Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are currently named with their actual names!

Especially because they own Minute Maid, and Minute Maid concentrated orange juice is still a thing.

In fact Minute Maid's very name alludes to it not being ready-to-drink.

Apps still stick a bunch of junk in their names though. Partially because there are app name squatters, and one way to get around an app name being taken is to add stuff to it. Partially due to SEO myths.

I have some ideas for them:

"Twitter - Whining & Doxxing"

"Facebook - Data mining & Old People"

"YouTube - Clickbait & Drama"

Fortunately the App Store name can be different from the app name once installed, which remains "Google Maps."

Why not just let people search by app (and book) description text (does it really not work this way already?)?

So it's often better to just play the same SEO games for their own products that everyone else has to play.

I Came to Another World as a Jack of All Trades and a Master of None to Journey while Relying on Quickness

or

There was a Cute Girl in the Hero's Party so I tried Confessing

or the rather tame

Didn't I Say To Make My Abilities Average In The Next Life?

It's kind of interesting to see what is done to make titles stand out in an age where anyone can write a novel on the web (or publish a book on Amazon).

* (I've Already Saved This World and Taken Its Wealth and Power and I Live Happily in a Castle with a Female Knight and Demon Queen, So To All Other Heroes) Stay Out of This Fantasy World.

* Sew It Up! Take It Off? Change!! My Girlfriend Failed Her High School Debut and Became a Hikikomori, So I Decided to Coordinate Her Youth (Fashion)

You also see the same trend with some manga titles:

* I'm a Middle-Aged Man Who Got My Adventurer License Revoked, But I'm Enjoying a Carefree Lifestyle Because I Have an Adorable Daughter Now

* A Story About Treating a Female Knight, Who Has Never Been Treated as a Woman, as a Woman

Indie publishing has also made high quality cover art much more important. I don't know about other people, but I regularly judge books based on their cover. There was a book in my recommendations list which I skipped for years just because I thought one of the guys on the cover looked like an asshole. Ended up enjoying it and regretting that I waited so long to pick it up. This isn't always the case, but more often than not, low quality cover art means poor writing as well.

I do, too. I've noticed something interesting. Fantasy book covers use a different style of art than scifi covers. You can reliably pick out from a distance which are fantasy and which are scifi.

    The title
    Is the haiku is
    The haiku

While search engines didn't exist back then, books of that era had these kinds of titles for similar reasons: they were a way of turning the book's cover into a piece of marketing. Books with long titles could explain their appeal to shoppers without requiring them to pick up the book and open it.

Interestingly, one of the things that may have led to titles getting shorter in the 19th century may be the advent of serialized fiction: as printing technology became more widely available, many famous stories like The Count of Monte Cristo and the early works of Charles Dickens were published chapter-by-chapter in weekly publications (quite similar to how manga are published in weekly magazines like Shounen Jump), and if you had an extra-long title that took up half a page every week, it would add to the printing cost in a non-trivial way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reborn_as_a_Vending_Machine,_I...

Once it stopped being weird it turned out that shoving a short description of your story into the title is a good way to grab readers.

0: https://www.chucktingle.com/ebook.html

For example, Skydiving dropzones. Some in Wisconsin:

  1. Skyknights -> Skydive Milwaukee
  2. AtmosphAIR -> Wisconsin Skydiving Center
  3. Green Bay Skydivers -> Skydive Freefall Adventure

1. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1992-11-08-920411...

Huh.

This is more true of creative pursuits (I don't think an artist should "dumb down their art" to increase mass appeal), but I think it holds true for businesses as well.

It's just very "Idiocracy" to me, but maybe I'm being oversensitive.

  mysql> desc articles; 
  +--------------+---------------+ 
  | Field        | Type          | 
  +--------------+---------------+ 
  | id           | int(11)       | 
  | kicker       | varchar(255)  | 
  | body         | longtext      | 
  | headline     | varchar(255)  | 
  | sub_headline | text          | 
  | teaser       | text          |

Kidding. I have used 191 as a length because of that though. :)

> Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships

Or another all time classic:

> The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of ROBINSON CRUSOE, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Iſland on the Coaſt of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been caſt on Shore by Shipwreck, where-in all the Men periſhed but himſelf. With An Account how he was at laſt as ſtrangely deliver'd by Pirates.

`Selected Contrary Essays on How Finally to Acquire an Education While Still in College Or Anywhere Else: Containing Some Belated Advice about How to Employ Your Leisure Time When Ultimate Questions Remain Perplexing in Spite of Your Highest Earned Academic Degree, Together with Sundry Book Lists Nowhere Else in Captivity to Be Found`

https://www.amazon.com/Another-Sort-Learning-James-Schall/dp...

SEO: Search Engine Optimization to expand markets both online and offline in the face of competition and substance

If they had reviews (reason we had affiliate code) organic search would work just fine.

Instead we give google the affiliate cut, in exchange of the privilege of tweaking our content to their search.

Our Market Research Shows That Players Like Really Long Card Names So We Made this Card to Have the Absolute Longest Card Name Ever Elemental

[1] https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multive...

Even conference talks are getting longer because length is often more important than the quality for most of the users.

You not liking it doesn't make it any less of a fact...

It's used my the laziest shills to place blame for their shit content on some notion of public stupidity.