Jack Dorsey on Naming Twitter & Square

Jack Dorsey talks with All Things D’s Kara Swisher about inventing Twitter and later, Square

Don’t you love podcasts? Podcasts for me are what I’d always hoped television could be. Whatever your interest, the best of the best are talking about it somewhere. In this case, Jack Dorsey talks with All Things D‘s Kara Swisher about inventing Twitter and later, Square – two giant ideas that are changing the way we see the world. In these excerpts from a great talk at the Commonwealth Club, we hear about the naming process. The takeaway for me is that as genius as Jack is, when it comes to naming, we’re all of us in the same boat. Kara contributes her own ‘domainer’ story as well that will resonate with anyone who’s spent any time in the domainer forums.
Entire interview: YouTube iTunes.

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(Click arrow to play audio) Naming Twitter
(Click arrow to play audio) Naming Square
(Click arrow to play audio) About Square.com
[Update: Square.com now redirects to SquareUp, so it looks like Jack got the domain.]

 

You Have To Go In Covert (To Get Your Domain Name)

Jake Winebaum shares what he paid for Brighter.com with Jason Calacanis.

Once again the always excellent This Week In Startups provides a gem of wisdom around the subject of domain names. Whether buyer or seller this short exchange will help you formulate a strategy. Jason proves he knows of what he speaks with his guess for what Jake Winebaum paid for Brighter.com. Some of you will remember Jake from his Business.com days and the story of how he bought that domain from Marc Ostrofsky. If you don’t know that story I highly recommend you check out Andrew Warner‘s interview with Marc on Mixergy.

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(Click arrow to play audio) You have To Go In Covert

 

My Rule Is Something You Can Spell

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Jason Calacanis & Steve Huffman

Steve Huffman, co-founder of Reddit and Hipmunk was recently the guest on This Week In Startups with Jason Calacanis. In this audio clip, Steve and Jason share their frustration with acquiring good dot coms and discuss their minimal criteria for choosing a domain. Funny that but for the random passing of a S. American tourist, Reddit might have ended up being called Read.ly or something worse. This is a great episode where Steve tells the story of how Reddit got made, and then sold. He was 22 when he and a co-founder sold Reddit to Conde Naste for a rumored $25M. You can check out the entire episode, with show notes, here.

(Click arrow to play audio clip) Steve Huffman My rule is something you can spell.

@Ev Paid $7500 for Twitter?

Tech Crunch ran a story today about Evan Williams paying $7500 for the Twitter domain name back in mid 2006. Thanks to tweets like these (@ev is the co-founder of Twitter he’s tweeting with Ed Shahzade @ed) people, are finally getting that it’s worth the money to acquire a good domain.

Tech Crunch ran a story today about Evan Williams paying $7500 for the Twitter domain name back in mid 2006. @ev is the co-founder of Twitter. He’s tweeting with Ed Shahzade @ed.

Evan Williams and Ed Shahzade Twitter Domain Thread
Evan Williams and Ed Shahzade Twitter Domain Thread

And   some Twitter history from LA Times.

Then when did the service’s name morph from “Status/Stat.us” to “twittr” to Twitter?

The working name was just “Status” for a while. It actually didn’t have a name. We were trying to name it, and mobile was a big aspect of the product early on … We liked the SMS aspect, and how you could update from anywhere and receive from anywhere.

We wanted to capture that in the name — we wanted to capture that feeling: the physical sensation that you’re buzzing your friend’s pocket. It’s like buzzing all over the world. So we did a bunch of name-storming, and we came up with the word “twitch,” because the phone kind of vibrates when it moves. But “twitch” is not a good product name because it doesn’t bring up the right imagery. So we looked in the dictionary for words around it, and we came across the word “twitter,” and it was just perfect. The definition was “a short burst of inconsequential information,” and “chirps from birds.” And that’s exactly what the product was.

I Should Ask For $5 Thousand – My Favorite Domain Story Ever

What’s so impressive about John’s story is that he learned from it and moved on.

John Reese photo by Ralph Zuranski
John Reese photo by Ralph Zuranski

Unfortunately I don’t know which podcast this clip came from. There’s no intro or outro, it’s from an interview I stumbled upon through a search for John Reese after I heard about the $million dollar launch of   a product called Traffic Secrets. What’s so impressive about John’s story is that he learned from it and moved on.

(Click arrow to play audio clip) John Reese’s Million Dollar domain story.

If You Didn’t Know What An Mp3 Is, Why Did You Register The Domain?

Jason Calacanis and Michael Robertson TWIST 42

Ultimate early internet domain name play story. In this excerpt Michael Robertson tells how he came
to own mp3.com and what happened when he ‘turned on’ the traffic.

(Click arrow to play audio clip) Michael Robertson tells the story of mp3.com.

In addition to starting mp3.com (later sold to Vivendi), Michael Robertson founded Lindows
(Linspire) and SIPphone (becamse Gizmo5, recently sold to Google). He’s now focused on
building mp3Tunes.com which allows users to store their music in the cloud and access it from
anywhere. Check out the entire interview at ThisWeekIn.com.