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Comment by julien_c | Hacker News Reader

Circular developer here. Ok, so last month I launched an open source clone of Buffer, built on top of Backbone, Bootstrap and MongoDB, and named Tampon.

Many people hated the name... However, the app as well as the open source project have seen some nice early adoption, so I've gone ahead and chosen a less controversial one.

I've also implemented multi-account support, which was by far the #1 feature request from users (As suggested by 37Signals I've discarded every other feature request :)), as well as many many other improvements.

Let me know what you think!

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Good on you for renaming the project... but why would you chose that name in the first place?

I'm not trying to start a flame war -- just curious because I've been in a similar situation.

After university I named the first C unit test framework I wrote the oh-so-obvious C*NT. At the time I thought I was being funny, but over a decade later and I can see that this is a symptom of the underlying misogyny/"boy's club" that is high tech.

Please, let's not talk about it again – what do you think about the app itself?

Would you consider a project called DICK or COCK to be misogynistic too?

Without wanting to start an argument, your example doesn't strike me as misogynistic; it doesn't seem like it would be any more offputting to women than to men, if we're assuming the same baseline personality.

Second wave feminists decided that that word in particular was bad no matter the context.

And third-wave feminism flirted with post-structuralism..

You guys should stop poking fun at feminism and check your privilege m'kay?

Since feminism is by definition confrontational, "checking the privilege" could be considered paternalistic.

no poking fun intended, merely a historical note that feminism (as a loosely-defined movement) had changing views about language and its use... if someone were to just hear about second-wave feminist stances on the language of oppression, they might have a hard time understanding things like the "slut walk" and other acts of linguistic reclamation.

Kinda glad that my sarcasm went mostly undetected, otherwise it would have been downvoted to oblivion.

It isn't a "bad" word. It's about the implications of using a tool in the workplace that is automatically going to garner giggles and stares at the reactions of the female employees. Imagine having to explain your workflow to your executives or train female social media employees on how to use something with a name like that. It's just awkward and unnecessary.

Whether or not its misogynistic is a distraction from the fact that its childish.

Because it stems a flow of twitter posts?

Isn't that good marketing? And won't most engineers use the code regardless of what its named? Seems like an interesting strategy to me :)

This wasn't an oversight, just a bit of failed translation. Julien mentioned it in the original launch thread, but Tampon in French loosely translates to "buffer." See what happened there? Give the fella a break.

Thanks for the clarification -- I'd never heard of circular/tampon before so I wasn't aware of what had happened, hence my question.

I'm even one of those people who never figured out what buffer app was for despite all their posts on HN.

It actually has both meanings in French. http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampon_hygi%C3%A9nique

Similar story here, I thought of writing a testing framework, somehow Testicle seemed as a funny name. Surprisingly it was already taken http://testicles.rubyforge.org/

I wonder how many development tools (and presumably other products) have been less successful than they could have been because their creators picked "clever" or "catchy" names (not necessarily rude.)

For example I would not look forward to explaining to my boss why I had chosen something called "COWSEL", "MUMPS", "SPITBOL" or "ZOPL" for a new project.

Lisp and Subversion were lucky enough to reach critical mass, but I reckon the people who picked those names were taking the same risk.

Git, the stupid content tracker.

Pure awesomesauce! :) Congrats on name pivot, Circular is a great choice.

With regards to Buffer, a potential friction point I pointed out to the team earlier this year, was the inability to select:

Who? (Friends, Public, <custom list>) and

Where? (private message, private group, wall post) a message should go to.

This is standard functionality in the Facebook sharer app, for example. (http://imgur.com/HPsXU)

Of course, Buffer and Circular adds When? (eg temporal dimension) to the mix, but no app I know of, has implemented all three, leaving you with a tradeoff, if all of those are important to your social workflow.

There was a scheduler app for FriendFeed (ffscheduler.com), did all three. It was made by @alpb (ahmetalpbalkan.com).

I'm thinking about forking and adding that features to Circular. Need to add Facebook support to it first though. No promises.

I was thinking this is the same thing as tampon until I saw tampon logo on the homepage and realized that tampon has changed the name. I didn't have much of an issue with the name but the change is sure for the good!

This is the exact reason why I left a small visual cue to the old name :)

Very cool - just a few weeks ago, I spent two weekends (8 hours total) building https://www.delayed-tweets.com. Sinatra on Heroku + Stripe along with a bunch of gems to connect up to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It's mainly for my personal use right now, but awesome to see others having simliar needs to schedule and cross post social updates.

[edit] The "big" monthly cost for this project for me is primarily the SSL add-on. Everything else amounts to nothing since I have no long running dynos, even for resque.

You seriously need auto-link shortening built in.

I was this " " close to acquiring the domain. Congratulations on the new name.

I love .io domains because as they're slightly more expensive you only buy them when you need to use them.

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