Lileks does Social Media
1st December 2009
The names of these companies makes me weep:
Zopo, Lefora, Meetro, Ning, Sinopio, CapaZoo, Joox, Foonz.
These are not businesses. These are characters in a pre-school TV show. I have a tough time imagining a hard-nosed venture capitalist saying Well, it’s an interesting idea you have, and on behalf of my group, we’re willing to invest $12 million in Shagafumoo. What is it you do again? Right, viral tagging and social cloud-mashups. I take no joy in seeing these companies founder and sink beneath the heaving waves of contemporary economic reality, but I still long for the old names of companies that either had a founder’s name hammered in stone on the company HQ, or at least said what they did. United Copper. American Pigeon-Cage Works. Amalgamated Knob. And yes, I know I posted some old logos of products with strange names just a few days ago, so this isn’t a new thing – but the new “Web 2.0” just seem so infantile. That’s all.