So an old naming project warmup exercise was to ask your audience:

• Why is it called Rhode Island if it is not an island?
• Why is it called junk food, when it is not junk and not food?

To which today we can add:

• Why is it called Facebook when it is not a book of faces?

Regardless, Facebook deserves their mega success as they go public this week. My only concern is if they have become the platform of choice for many businesses in place of websites. A clean, simple, almost boring name without any hot logo is the story at Facebook… but not really.. because it is a book of everyone’s personal stories and pictures.

Talking of which – did an interesting sign/name catch your eye? Why not post it on Brighter Naming’s Facebook page with a brief comment and help us build the biggest Fun Name Signs album in the world?

Might be fun to see what happens to all these folks that have been reselling domains from small countries when more high level domains are released next year. For starters, what if .curios becomes a top level domain?

In the meantime, looks like this is another college crazy mixup by people who don’t understand the complexity of marketing, though it is not as bad as their colleagues with the Doostang site – see what the Name Critic rated that one! On the other hand, Doostang has been able to register it as a federal trademark.

While their three star logo is a little bland, it too is a registered trademark. And it sure is hard to come up with any unique icon nowadays for a travel firm.

But their little roaming gnome character is sheer genius. Talk about putting a face on a service. One you don’t have to pay royalties too. One so popular it has its own online shop. One that plays its own starring role in a popular TV series: In at least one episode of each season of The Amazing Race competitors have to find a gnome and take it along to the next stop.

What better way to market and promote your service? What a clever way to do product placement right in a major series when you are an invisible service company that has no product! Yes, we hear the leg winners getting prizes compliments of Travelocity. But our heart reacts to the little gnome and makes us believe we will have support with us wherever we travel the world – a very, very important factor for most of us discount shoppers.

Travelocity  is thus awarded our top 3 star gold award for naming and branding.

This leads to two big problems: (1) They can’t get a trademark as they are generic, and (2) They can’t be found on the internet because we drown in results from Google and Bing when we search on their name.

And often it leads to a third problem too – when the company grows up it outgrows its own name, just when you want to start building a broader brand without ignoring your existing brand equity. Look at the logo statement here from Plastic Engineering (a nice generic)!  They do metals! Bet you never would have guessed that from their name.

Which got me to thinking about their name. What if I wanted to compete with them and start a separate business certification service? Could we then be Best Business Bureau? Not likely.. sounds awkward and may even trigger a law suit as being “confusingly similar”. So this is a name that has both first mover advantage and is also a good blocking move.

But if you run into a situation like this, do not despair. The trick is to just go a completely different way. In fact, in many areas now a better certification is to be a Diamond Certified Business.

Are they all so young and naive at Google on this project that they don’t know Microsoft and others have already tried and failed with the Wallet name? Plus Google, on their own homepage for it, can’t decide whether it is written with a capital W or not. What on earth is that scooby do scribble logo all about?

But far worse, a wallet is something you store cash and credit cards in. You don’t pay with your wallet. And if you live outside the USA and are a lady, you don’t even own a wallet. Elsewhere ladies keep their money in their purse, which they then keep in their handbags. I wonder if Google programming geeks know the power women have shopping. Why cut them out from the get go?

Of course, this is an effort to fix a problem they have had since its inception with Google Checkout. What a dumb restrictive name that is. Didn’t even their basic market research tell them that Paypal is used for so much more than checking out? In fact it has become a major money transfer and online services payment system, in many cases without there being a shopping cart checkout procedure involved at all.

Oh well, when Paypal was young and poor and every dollar counted, they spent a few thousand on a naming consultant and now have this powerful brand name. At the time they were not owned by the big corporate eBay, which was probably to their advantage. They had to brand and position themselves correctly. And they didn’t have the big egos like Googleites who know it all.. but then make stupid mistakes and think they are invincible. No wonder so many products at Google don’t take off and 95% or more of revenue is still from their basic search ad revenues.

PS Wallets are from the pilgrims days.. to carry your coins in. Modern payment systems will be all electronic or smart card based… no leather needed. Maybe they can call it Google Silver, since they already have Google Chrome!

PPS Not quite as bad a name as Google+ though. See what the naming critic had to say about that over at Brighter Naming.

Plus we have all heard enough insults about someone being a fat cow, so why not give it a friendly, functional name like Skinny Cow. Then dress it up with a friendly cow with a small waist being confirmed by the tape measure, and you finally have a product that can cut through much of the noise of the traditional sugary brands in the candy aisle.  Thank you Nestle.

Plus as my regular readers know, I always like product names that also have some visual identity too. Why not, after all we are all so visual anyway.

So when you find a great root name that is so applicable to your product, as ghost is, then coin a unique, new, applicable word and dress it up, you get all my votes and endorsement. And on top of that to provide such a useful little package for free – fabulous. You deserve a big name award.

For those of you who don’t want to be tracked on the internet, this is the software to run. It even shows you which trackers have been disabled site by site. I have just exited the NFL site after checking football scores. Along the way I found eight spyware packages that would have been tracking me were it not for Ghostery. Thank you from the bottom of my computer heart.

So, of course, I couldn’t resist looking up steve.jobs, which takes me to Employ Media LLC, who I think is the actual registrar of .jobs domains, since their website leads to dot.jobs.  And yes, Coca Cola does own cocacola.jobs so www.cocacola.jobs leads to their employment page. But it is stupid to think they will be forced to buy up all the new domains to protect their brand. In fact, they may not even qualify to buy many of them. For example, one of the new domains is bound to be .hotel.  Assuming CocaCola has not yet put their name on a hotel, they may not be entitled to this domain, just like they can’t have a .edu name without proving they are an actual education facility, or a .cat name without proving they have an office in Catalonia, Spain.

This all goes to show how feeble the US advertising and major brands consortium protest about the new domain names has become. In fact, the bigger push has come from the international markets. If you were Russian wouldn’t you want some domains in the Cyrillic character set? Or in Arabic if you were a Middle East country? Or Kanji or Katakana in Japan? Or with simply a proper accented character if you were French or Spanish or Scandinavian? Thank goodness ICANN is not controlled by the USA at all. The internet is now a global communications major infrastructure and deserves the world’s input and direction.

Now that I had reason to actually use such a service, I visited them again and am completely blown away. They have become the site for professional photographers. Yes you have to pay them a little… but it took me only a few hours on their free trial before I was saying please take my money. It is far more than a photo cataloging site. It is the place to sell and show quality photos. But it is also a great backend for any website that has to handle hundreds of photos that change and evolve a lot – which means it has to be user driven and not webmaster driven.

In my case I was researching this on behalf of a separate family business, and they don’t even do photography per se. But it is a great tool for them to catalog all their jewelry collections. They were adding photos via  a simple drag and drop at a rapid rate the day after I set them up. It is also the perfect tool for storing all the artwork of a graphics department or ad agency or corporate marketing images or science pictures to share worldwide.

So.. in short, a great find and a real fine pro job. Very classy.  But that name?  Sure it is catchy. And yes they can have fun with it. But no it is not about mug shot databases for prisoners or employees – a whole other business application. I fear that however they perfume the pig, the name SmugMug will never be as classy an outfit as they really are. Pity.