Whirrl? Both Need Naming Advice — Whrrl or

Bad web 2.0 names abound, but this case is particularly bad.

Fresh firms get creative with naming, often times to save a thousand bucks on domain names. For example, Flickr.com dropped the ‘e’ from Flicker.com. Some would call Flickr.com a success story, but by choosing this domain they likely left money on the table. Flicker.com gets 150,000 type-in visitors a month from people looking for the popular photo sharing site. Perhaps it would have sold for more money had it captured all of the traffic. Yes, most people realize their error and go to the correct site, but many don’t.

I just read a particularly distressing story regarding bad firm/product naming. John Cook of Seattle Post-Intelligencer writes regarding Whrll.com and Whirrl.com, two products with really bad names. Imagine one of them telling you their name. You’d probably remember it as “Whirl”. What makes this case even worse is that both of these products are very similar.

Co-founder of one of the firms, Darren Erik Vengroff told Cook:

“We went out and got as many domains as we could get our hands on that were variant spellings. That’s obviously one that was taken and we weren’t able to get. But if you mix up the R’s or L’s or put too many of one or the other, we are able to redirect you to our site.”

Here’s the problem, Darren. Your firm name itself is a misspelling. How can you expect people to properly spell a misspelling?

The real winner her is Whirl.com, which is suddenly getting a lot more traffic.