Why these names?
July 19th, 2005
I can understand why it’s fun to make up new names for techniques and technologies but why has it become increasingly popular lately?
There’s blogoshpere, designosphere, designologue, blogging, AJAX, so on and so forth.
What’s with names anyway?
How is a name contrived? Well, in the beginning there was a necessity for creating a name for the web app that the developers were constructing. It made it easier for everyone around the office to talk about what they were doing if it had a name. Makes sense, I wouldn’t want to walk around talking about the “website that will allow users around the globe to upload, store, label, and tag photos” if it didn’t have a name either. [No points for anyone that can guess who that was referring to, it's just too easy]
So creating a name for a full featured web app is a necessity. I don’t know how many people out there have ever looked for venture capital before but it’s pretty hard to sell an app with 15 words in the title.
Why create names for already existing technologies or techniques? Marketing, pure and simple. By coining a new phrase, or re-wrapping an old technique, you can give yourself the upper hand. All you have to do is create the buzz around this “new” technology/technique by creating a few tutorials, and some well placed articles. This creates a tight association between then new buzzword and your company.
For example
Take the following as examples:
- Blogging and Blogger.com: They may not have created the term blogging but they definitely capitalized on the terminology. By using a derivative of the term, they basically astablished themselves as experts in the field. That may not be true to the more educated of the world but to their audience — the working man, students, and your average internet junkie — they certainly did. By leveraging the name, they also effectively ensured that they reached the top 10, possibly top 5 search results for any search on the term blog, blogging or bloggers. Pretty smart in my opinion. Then they were bought out by Google, can’t get much better than that.
- AJAX and Adaptive Path: This happened more recently and have created waves amongst the entire online community. The technology and techniques have been around for quite a while, more commonly known as XMLhttpRequest. It hasn’t been extremely popular until now but it was still around. What Adaptive Path did was create a new catch-phrase for the techniques and technology. With some quick explanations they have set themselves up as the leader of the pack, even though others have been doing the same thing (sometimes for even longer). The buzz that is going around because of this new catch-phrase may point the light on the techniques but it also comes back to Adaptive Path.
On July 31st, 2005, Nathan Smith said:
While a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, I agree - on the ‘net, it’s all about the name. Sometimes I think that companies tend to find an acronym and work backwards to make it fit, but I think in the case of AJAX, it was a web-technique/system/technology that is very pervasive across the ‘net, but was begging for a more concise name to help, like you said - make it a household term for the working-man.
Now every Tom, Dick & Harry businessman wants his company website to have a Blog, Flash, and AJAX, even though when hard-pressed, he has no idea what that really means. In steps the web developer / designer, who is savvy enough to keep up on internet trends, and bada-boom, a match is made and a successful site is launched.
While I don’t like to throw around terms just for the sake of it (my blog is labeled Journal, thank you very much), I think that it is important to recognize trends and at least work with them to help clients. The iPod on the other hand, still perplexes me. :)
On August 6th, 2005, Mike said:
That is very true, although dealing with companies that are tossing these terms around can be very dangerous. If one guy in the company has heard the term AJAX but doesn’t know what it means suddenly changes our roles. This is where the education comes into play and our role becomes teacher.
So even though it would be a great match when a designer/developer knows the techniques or technologies the company is asking for it doesn’t mean they should be used.