Fwiw, a "face book" is a thing you would get at Harvard (and Yale and presumably lots of other schools too but I'm not sure), kind of like a yearbook but at the start of freshman year instead of the end. So for the earliest thefacebook.com users, the name was actually familiar. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_book

Its a thing in all US high schools - so for US searchers it would be very obvious

Back in the 70's in the UK one of our American teachers mentioned then in our general studies class when we where doing America one term - she refused to show us her entry :-)

It's definitely not a thing in all US high schools. I'm pretty sure yearbooks are the thing most US high schools have.

Might be regional our American English Teacher was from the posh east cost and a "facebook" was what she called it.

No, definitely not a thing at "all US high schools."

I can believe it's a thing at really posh high schools though.

I feel that the importance of optimizing brand name is over-hyped. A lot of it is retrospective reasoning, arguing why such name is good for popularity after the brand becomes popular.

Legend says Steve Jobs told his two cofounders, who were scratching their heads over an innovative name, that if they didn’t find a name within 24hrs he would incorporate as Apple.

Which is good enough and no reason to hold up the whole process for a decent name.

I just ran across this talk where Jobs basically makes that claim:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvMgMrNDlg

He says it was also because he liked apples, and it was ahead of Atari in the phone book.

It's also in front of Atari in the phonebook.

I don't know, I was going to start an auction site with the memorable name "eBay", but then someone beat me to it.

(Counterpoint: it is pretty short and pronounceable..)

Also Microsoft's "Internet Explorer" at the time became so popular due to the word 'Internet' compared to a 'Netscape'. So many non-technical people just thought that was the 'way in' when they bought their first PC.

Is that the real reason? Being bundled with the OS as the default browser for 95% of all computers seems like a bigger driver!

Neither of those are the reason, speaking from experience both as a family tech support and as a web dev. It’s because everyone recognized the big “e” icon. My brother got my dad a Mac and he already knew the main browser was Safari, but he still called me (knowing I had used Macs for years longer) and just asked:

1. What the hell is Safari (no kidding he didn’t even say hello).

2. Can I use the Internet Explorer?

Edge now (correctly) accounts for this by... having a big “e”-looking icon and basically otherwise being a skin over Chromium.

I think you're confusing cause and effect here.

Yes, the `e` became synonymous with the Internet for a lot of users, but that's only because of the two reasons listed. Not the other way around.

Internet Explorer became popular because it was bundled with Windows.

At the time, IE was also dramatically faster than Netscape Navigator, because it wasn't just bundled, it was built in.

Was it really faster? I think IE had faster start-up time, since some of the components were loaded along with Windows boot, but I don't think it was faster overall.

Facebook was founded a decade after Amazon. 2004 vs 1994. Google was already dominate and it IPO’d the same year. They’re both old at this point but Amazon is in a whole different class of “early internet”.

Plus, wasn’t the default Android sms/mms client once called Messenger? So, not only not memorable, but also confusingly generic.