[kmontrose]

A compelling product will make a mediocre name memorable, but not vice versa.

My go to example for this is Google, the largest site in the world. It's a) a joke name b) that almost no-one knows c) and if you know it, it's misspelled! But because it's was head and shoulders above its competitors that garbage name is now part of the vernacular ( http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/google ).

Other pretty bad names (that we all accept as "good" now): Wikipedia (the hell's a wiki in 2001?), Twitter (what part of that conveys online SMS, or micro-blogging?), Flickr (no e, at least it's not .ly).

I think it's worth looking around for good names, but it's cut-throat out there in .com land, and if you're ever spending more time thinking up names than improving your product you're doing it wrong.

This is all completely ignoring the "search to find" user behavior that is (by my measurements anyway) really really common, even in pretty technical audiences.

[lobster_johnson]

Exactly. The notion that a name should be transparent -- that its linguistic meaning should make the product obvious -- is a myth. Google, Apple, Nike, Lexus and McDonald's are all brands where the name bears no resemblance to the product or even industry they represent. The product gives meaning to the name, not the other way around.

[bobsil1]

Twitter evokes short bursts of speech, Flickr evokes light and movies, Google evokes size.