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Comment by trin_ | Hacker News Reader

awful name, at least for the german market. kik is a very cheap textil-discount-chain in germany thats notorious for low-income areas and as a business has many critics because of their employee treatment (esp wages, paid overtime and mobbing) and the producers of their cheap clothes (bad working conditions etc).

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I think 3-letter pronouncable domain name trumps German market secondary meanings.

Is that necessarily true? Germany is not exactly a small country (and Kik has a _really_ bad reputation), and few people type in domains directly anymore. What matters more than a good domain name is a name that is easy to remember and google. So I don't know. It might be either way.

I don't think it'd be much of a problem, kik the shop may have a bad reputation but I don't think people will easily confuse the two companies.

3-letter pronouncable dot com. That's worth a lot.

When I read "Kik (avc.com)", I did briefly think of the retailer, and the associated negative emotions. Maybe that's just me, of course.

It's better than one of the competitors called "whatsapp". I tried Kik out last week after hearing about it on HN and really liked it over the alternatives. Sadly the court of popular opinion in my country seems to side with Whatsapp messenger.

Whenever I think of "kik" I think of the three letters next to it on a qwerty keyboard "lol". Perhaps they wanted to make the name LOL messenger but switched to kik for whatever reason.

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