A few years ago the Unofficial Dreamhost Blog circulated a list of the worst domain names. Domains like therapistfinder.com (Therapist Finder) and molestationnursery.com (Mole Station Nursery) seemed to top the list as the worst of the worst, while penisland.net (Pen Island) had members flocking to the site to see what all the fuss was about.
We cannot stress enough how important it is to choose a good name when you’ve found it. Below is an updated list of great companies with bizarre names or domains. Consider this a cautionary tale.
1. Doostang.com: Founded in 2005 by Harvard, Stanford and MIT students, Doostang helps young professionals accelerate their careers. In this case, acceleration actually sounds like a bad thing; nevertheless, it’s nothing that can’t be prevented by a little Pepto Bismol.
2. Twubs.com: Twubs is the hash tag-based aggregator that helps event planners broadcast a live conference stream and organize event-related social media. Surprisingly this event assistant runs faster than he looks.
3. fTags.com: This site provides real time twitter streams on niche topics and aggregates them to one place. Unfortunately an ftag sounds a lot like a “tramp stamp”, so if it were up to us we’d be aggregating your tweets to a tattoo elegantly etched above your buttocks.
4. BLEWS: We last mentioned Microsoft’s BLEWS in an article on media bias deconstruction. The name is a portmanteau of blogosphere and news. For a brilliant project built on the principles of natural language processing, the name doesn’t just blow in the present tense, it blew and continues to do so with grammatical errors.
5. Putacart.com: This site is best known as the shopping cart widget that goes anywhere. Something tells us Spanish language users might not want to go there without a condom.
If you’ve got more nominations for bizarre names, add them to the comments below.
Photo credits: Dennis Mojado,
