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Shameless plug of my own take on this: http://messymatters.com/nominology Sam Stokes (Rapportive co-founder) called it his "favourite post on naming things". :) Ooh, and Sam's coworker called it "absolutely brilliant". I might be reaching now.
Your "three tests of a name" don't mention "does someone else own that name, or something similar, and are they likely to sue?" That could be important for some people.
I'm really relieved that your name is 'learndot', and not 'learn.'.
Seriously, I'm not sure why everyone in this thread is so convinced that their name or name-choosing process is somehow genius or better than that of the OP. Obviously the OP knows that choosing a name is tough and you're never going to get the perfect name. It's all about compromising in the right places to get a name, a domain, a social presence, and so forth.
Personally, I found the story educational and a close parallel to my own difficulties with choosing names. I'm especially grateful for the discussion of buying the domain name. I'd like to hear the actual dollar value, but I can understand why that wasn't mentioned. At least it's clear that the price moved by $1000's which gives some frame of reference instead of us just guessing whether it was $100 or $100,000.
Hey, let me also jump on the bandwagon of armchair-quarterbacking your decision! -Insert quip about how easy it is to do this stuff here...- Boom! I showed you! Seriously, I'm not sure why everyone in this thread is so convinced that their name or name-choosing process is somehow genius or better than that of the OP. Obviously the OP knows that choosing a name is tough and you're never going to get the perfect name.…
I'm interested in this particular thing: Twitter handle was registered, but had never tweeted and looked abandoned. I contacted a friend who works at Twitter and after a bit of investigation was able to get @learndot as well Is this something that's easy to do? Can it be done if you don't know anyone inside Twitter? I had to settle for something like @myappnameapp instead of @myappname because the username was alread…
The way to do this (I've heard) if you do not know anyone at Twitter is to buy a lot of ads then ask your sales rep to see if they can help.
According to the article, one of the reasons they changed the company name is because it was hard for people to understand the old name when spoken verbally. Their new name seems to have the same problem. For example: Learndot: "Email me at paul-at-learn-dot-dot-com" Customer: "learn dot com?" Learndor "No, learn dot dot com" Customer "???"
This was my first thought exactly. They went from a name that was difficult for people to spell/pronounce correctly to one that is confusing in the context of the web. I'm not sure which is worse to be honest. After hearing the new name verbally people may either; type in "learn." into Google which I doubt they will be the first result, or be left waiting for the "com" part and still not have the right idea.
We went through similar issues in our rebranding, with both a dot and pronounceability (D.NEA). In our case, the '.' is not spelled out, and the domain works with or without it (d.neadiamonds.com). Being primarily internet based, most people don't need to pronounce it, they just follow a link or search for the name. If we talk to them, they'll hear us say it when answering the phone, but we aren't too concerned with how people pronounce it. After five years of using this name, most people get it close enough.
Learndot looks to be an overall better name than Matygo.
First off: great post! I've told clients similar things before. You need to be able to tell someone your website name and be able to have them find it very easily. Unless you're one of the only ones in your space and people will find your site searching for key terms, it's very important that your site is easy to find, pronounce and spell. With all that said, I'm curious as to why you went with a logo that, to me, is…
Maybe connect the post and dot with a bar, or remove some of the spacing. Make the "o" a solid dot instead?
I'm a big fan of this technique in many aspects of my work. Whether it be a programming problem or needing to work through a creative idea, if I'm not 100% confident in a solution I step away from the problem for a day or two and usually have a lot more insight when I come back to it.
BTW, glad to see you guys moving forward; I check your blog once in a while and haven't seen much lately. Good luck!