The agonies of picking a product name and how we chose Trello
blog.fogcreek.com
blog.fogcreek.com
It's easier to remember names that are concrete (even though monkeys have nothing to do with surveys) or have a memorable connection to the product's usage, like Reddit.
When someone hears the name, understands the product's use or sees the site, try to give them a thread that they can pull on later to remember the name. That's all.
I feel bad about calling out Ninite as a counterexample but several HNers say they can never remember their name. If your name isn't relevant, at least let it be memorable.
Sometimes you don't appreciate what you have (with minor modifications) until you take the journey.
So they hired a consulting firm and paid them about half a million dollars (IIRC) to come up with a new name.
In the end, the name they picked was.. Marina Bay. Yes, half a million to just continue with the old name! The spin was that the name was good and already part of the national culture/image. Which, to the layman, was obvious from the start :-)
OT. Are number in product names or domain names bad in general? E.g. foobar101.
From the look of it, there's only one L.
I don't think you can avoid this kind of thing if you want a short and pronounceable name.
Is having [product].com that important?
In their book and blog 37Signals has generally played down the importance of urls. Pointing to the use of basecamphq.com for their project management offering.
I must say I am on the fence. Clearly appending something to your product's name opens more options for un-squatted domains but at what cost to the end user?
We considered trelloapp.com (and use trelloapp on Twitter), and my guess is that it all would have turned out fine either way. But I still have a possibly irrational attachment to the [name].com
In the mobile world the {product}app.com convention is pretty prevalent and has opened up some choices. You could always start a new convention for web-based products.
I personally don't think a single product needs to have its own unique domain. Most browsers nowadays have the combo URL/search field feature (or the search field is right next to the URL). Someone typing in the product name will likely find it one way or another.
I know of a little anecdotal evidence: A .org I know of used to routinely have to remind people it was .org, not .com. The owner of another .org I know of once stated bluntly they "farked up" by not buying the .com version as well, which was bought at some point by a company (using the same name, if I recall correctly -- physically located elsewhere). And, of course, there is the infamous whitehouse .com to take advantage of the fact that even for .gov sites, people mentally default to the .com mode.
No formal studies or anything (that I know of), but there is some anecdotal evidence that it makes a difference of some sort.
I dislike names which 1) can't be said and transcribed unambiguously over a 4kbps bad cellphone call by a non-native speaker to a non-native speaker and 2) don't have an unambiguous pronunciation...people might not mention your product if they're afraid of sounding stupid mispronouncing "ver-say-che", etc.
I agree with your points but think trello is fairly unambiguous, considering it was an available (? or cheap) 6 letter .com domain.
Now hypothetically assuming I was doing cow food online, I might make my domain cowfood .com and brand it as "Cow Food Online." That way you get a bonus when people search for [cow food], which is likely to be orders of magnitude more than [cow food online].
As patio mentioned, there is the exact match bonus where your domain (com/net/org) matches the query exactly. Also, an exact match domain tends to lead to anchor text (inbound links) with the keyword. So the one-two punch of an EMD (exact match domain + keyword-rich anchor text) is extremely helpful.
One word of caution with EMDs... I bought an EMD CattleTags.com for an e-commerce store and have had to work on my branding to encourage people to link to me as "Cattle Tags Online" or "Cattle Tags Store" rather than "CattleTags.com" which isn't as desirable.
In short part of SEO is knowing what your customers are searching for, and targeting that.
I'm using Chrome 13. Amusing.
More on that in this Mixergy interview: http://mixergy.com/sean-harper-feefighters-intervie/
Take it from someone who has actually had to change a project name after two years. You want a name that's pronouncable, barely memorable, but nothing to do with any real words that others might contend for. There's a reason for all those crappy nonsense-word names. They put an end to the pain so that developers can go back to developing actual functionality.