brand (n.): a class of goods identified by name as the product of a single firm or manufacturer. also, a mark made by burning with a hot iron to attest manufacture or quality or to designate ownership

That’s right! I had never put two and two together and associated modern-day “branding” using logos and publicists with Wild West-era “branding” using a red-hot hunk of metal and a cow’s ass, but there it is, right there in front of our faces. Fortunately, modern day branding is only a little bit more painful than the classical kind. Behold, a survey of some of the silliest, stupidest, and cringe-worthiest brand names of the New Millenium.

del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is a nerd pun based on the fact that there exists a domain suffix .us, every bit as real and legitimate as .com and .org, but easier to work into a dorky name. The principle of del.icio.us — tagged online bookmarking — is brilliant, but as a URL it’s unusual, it’s annoying to say out loud, and it doesn’t always get automatically hyperlinked when typed into an email or some such. Plus it bears an unseemly resemblance to the moniker of Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am. As a result, del.icio.us came to their senses and moved the whole enterprise to delicious.com when they redesigned the site and more or less ruined it.

Gnutella

Gnutella is one of the top filesharing networks that has arisen in the post-Napster era. It’s the operating network behind such applications as BearShare, Limewire, and Morpheus. The name Gnutella is a portmanteau of GNU (a freeware operating system; the acronym is recursive, and stands for “GNU’s Not Unix,” which I’m willing to count as another strike against Gnutella) and Nutella, the scrumptious hazelnut spread that should never have been dragged into this. Granted, Gnutella is a free, open protocol, and so it was named by programmers rather than by marketing guys, but is this really the best they could do? What about Gnudity? Gnuroscience? Gnuremberg?

Flickr

Flickr is one of the largest photo-sharing sites online and the one generally preferred by serious photographers. Flickr isn’t the worst name in the world in and of itself, but like Pearl Jam spawning Creed, Flickr can be blamed for the rash of horrific vowel-dropping brands that followed, including Delivr, Tumblr, Colr, and Shittr. Flickr hasn’t been at the cutting edge of web technology for a long time, since it was bought by Yahoo!, at least, but it is such a totemic presence on the Web2.0 netscape (ding!) that its name continues to influence new enterprises to this day — and in fact, entrepreneurs continue to try to push the envelope, in such cases as…

Perspctv

God, really? Perspctv is a political news aggregator that pulls in blog posts, mainstream media articles, and Twitter posts (or “tweets”) and displays data sets gleaned from them (and from other sources) in friendly charts. Perspctv is also arguably the dumbest fancy-pants abbreviation I’ve ever seen, considering it’s hard to remember, hard to type, and easy to parse as PerSpc TV. Even one more E, to make the site Perspectv, would go a long way in making it a more salient brand name, but apparently the allure of XTRM TXT MSSG-SPK was too tempting to pass up. Hey, Perspctv? There’s this new thing called an iPhone/Blackberry/Treo/Sidekick which has rendered such crucial abbreviations as “rpblcn prty” and “ambdxtrs” obsolete.

Tags: marketing