The trend graveyard

In June 2010, Yahoo finally got flicker.com.

Not the photo site. Yahoo had owned that since 2005. This was the plain, correctly spelled, fully voweled domain, and getting it took six years, a reported $600,000 offer in 2007 that was turned down, and eventually a lawsuit settlement (TechCrunch, 14 June 2010). The owner had refused to sell in 2004 as well, which is the reason Caterina Fake suggested dropping the "e" and the company shipped as Flickr.

The company that made the missing vowel look like a design decision spent six years buying the vowel back.

That is the shape of many internet-era naming trends. A naming fad is often a shortage that learned to dress well.

The fashions on this page began as workarounds for domains somebody could not have. The aesthetic arrived afterward, applied by people who needed a compromise to look like a decision. Then enough founders hit the same wall, reach for the same workaround, and the workaround stops being clever and starts being a timestamp. Four of them. Three are buried. One is still walking around.

Exhibit A — the missing vowels

Flickr, 2004. Twttr, 2006. Tumblr, 2007. For most of a decade, deleting a letter was how you signaled that you shipped software.

Then it curdled, loudly. Christopher Price, quoted in Trend Mill's history of disemvoweling, wrote the epitaph:

"At the end of the day… it all comes down to one simple, absolute truth: Tumbler.com looks fucking stupid."

He is right, and why he is right is the useful part. A dropped vowel can be a tax collected in conversations about your company for as long as the brand remains. You spell it on phone calls. You spell it on podcasts. Some companies eventually buy the correctly spelled domain to catch the traffic.

Notice what did not happen. Tumblr never became Tumbler. Flickr is still Flickr. The trend died and the survivors kept their names, because a name that has already done its job is not worth relaunching. That asymmetry is the fad's cruelest trick: it costs the winners nothing and it dates everybody else.

Exhibit B — -ly, and the naming trend that had a foreign policy

By October 2010 the suffix was worn out enough that someone opened an Ask HN thread called "What's the deal with start-ups named ly?". A commenter, olalonde, produced the most efficient cost-benefit analysis in the history of the genre:

"Pros: Early adopters will immediately know you're a cool startup. Cons: In a few years, the exact opposite will happen, '<verb>ly is so 2010'. Libya might might delete your domain name."

Both halves landed. The first is how a fad ordinarily ends, by becoming a datestamp. The second is the half everybody forgets.

.ly is Libya.

Founders in that wave were buying into Libyan registry policy. .com was gone, Libya's registry was selling, and the risk became visible inside a year. In June 2010, NIC.ly restricted .ly domains shorter than four characters to registrants with a Libyan presence. In October it deleted vb.ly outright, on the grounds that the site's content fell outside Libyan Islamic law (TechCrunch, 6 October 2010). olalonde posted two weeks after that, with the news still warm.

His prediction landed in April 2011, when Letter.ly lost its domain during the Libyan civil war (TechCrunch, 4 April 2011). This one was bureaucratic. The registration expired, the agency they had registered through had been knocked out by the war, and there was nobody left to renew with.

An email startup in the United States lost its address because of an armed conflict in North Africa, because .com was expensive.

Exhibit C — Labs, Hub, HQ, and the get- prefix

The trend with no aesthetic, and therefore no death. getsomething.com. usesomething.com. somethinghq.com. Basecamp launched on basecamphq.com. Call this one a rash: perennial, never peaking, and too practical to inspire much pride or shame.

They earn a paragraph anyway, because they are the most honest fad on this page. Vowel-dropping and -ly at least dressed the compromise up. The get- prefix does not bother. It announces, in the address bar, that the name you wanted was taken.

Exhibit D — AI, and the fad that has already come back once

Which brings us to the one still walking around, and to the part of this page I had wrong before I checked it.

The received wisdom is that the AI suffix is on its way out. Our own research notes said exactly that, and cited Crunchbase. So I read the Crunchbase piece. It is by Joanna Glasner, it surveys more than 1,000 seed-stage startups that raised $200,000 or more over nine months, and it says that adding AI to the end of a name "is still common, but seems to be waning some."

It was published on 7 February 2018.

No numbers, and a different fad. That sentence describes the previous AI naming wave, the 2016–2018 one, and it was accurate at the time. Then the whole thing came back several times larger.

Which leaves a finding worse than the one I went looking for: naming fads can go dormant. The 2018 call was correct and completely useless as a guide to 2023, and somebody will write the same sentence about .ai in about a year, with the same confidence and the same shelf life.

That kills the tempting strategy. You cannot time this. Naming deliberately against the current fashion in the hope of looking early is the same fashion with the sign flipped, and it dates on exactly the same schedule.

The test

One question, uncomfortable on purpose:

Can you name the shortage your name is solving?

If the answer comes easily — the .com was taken, we needed something on .ai, we wanted it short — then the name is a workaround, and the workaround is your cohort's uniform.

The second check is mechanical. Do not search your candidate name. Search its pattern. If the technique that produced it also produced forty funded companies inside the same two years, you have found a fashion. Keep looking.

The part where I take it back, slightly

Flickr is a fad name. Flickr is also a good name. It is compact and familiar enough that the missing "e" receded as the product became well known.

A trend name can outlive the trend. Succeed, and the name may get absorbed into the thing it points at until the technique stops being visible. Fail, and it is more likely to remain what it was on the first day: a timestamp and a compromise.

So the uniform is survivable. It may do less work on your behalf, and you may pay for that somewhere else.