Why our product went viral in Brazil for the wrong reasons | Hacker News Reader

Why our product went viral in Brazil for the wrong reasons

dafacto.com

134 pointsmakalumhenders56 comments

Since the article text itself doesn't mention exactly why the name is so bad - Rego, the name of the product, is slang for ass crack in Portuguese. I can sort of understand why you wouldn't want to put that in the post itself, but it's also a little annoying to have to watch a video to find out why it went viral.

Thank you. I agree, it's annoying to have to rely on sound, I'm in a public place without headphones with me. The article itself said almost nothing. Glad I saw your comment; without that I would've assumed it was just about what Google Translate told me it meant in Portuguese (trench, gutter).

I enjoyed watching the video since if I had read your comment, it would have spoiled the entire reason why this post is pretty hilarious..... Finding out the context of a "joke" before the joke being told is kind of a spoiler.

Anyway, watch the video if you can, it's worth the minute.

I do get that, but lots of people either don't want to watch a video or can't, for various reasons.

I hope this wasn't a problem for too many people, because (tongue in cheek here) I'm positive everyone reads the articles first before coming to read the comments.

You're a brave person to use "tongue in cheek" on this thread.

I didn't watch the video on the principle that I hate people baiting me into watching a video. Thanks for posting a synopsis. I read the comments in this thread just for that reason.

Thanks for your recommendation to watch the video, it was funny enough not to regret it.

That said, I don't think objclxt's comment spoils the fun of the video because even in the video he explains what Rego means before getting to the funny stuff.

I thought the same thing but the way it is explained in the video is hilarious.

I feel like this comment ruins the joke.

Thanks. Didn't bother watching the video either and was slightly annoyed they never mentioned in the text. (Again, sensationalist title, and probably a cheesy video. But maybe I just woke up with a bad mood :))

This.

Reading their copy in portuguese is hilarious! It's like a real-world version of the Cloud to Butt extension[1].

If you haven't seen the video (Rego == Buttcrack):

    Your Rego is private. Nobody can see what you put in your 
    Rego. But we know that sometimes you wanna share your Rego 
    with a friend, and we make that easy!

[1] https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt

I'm surprised I can't see any reference to "rego" meaning anything like "butt crack" except in articles talking about this precise incident.

What Richard said is why I didn't mention the meaning in the title; it'd be a spoiler! Anyway, Gizmodo in Brazil covered the app in an article entitled, "This is not a HANDS-ON review!" which got thousands of RTs and Facebook likes. We then responded with that video, and they followed up with a second article -- glad to see we were taking the news in good humor!

As someone who never understood the appeal of foursquare/gowalla kind of apps, I do like this one — saving locations just for myself and sharing only if I really want to. Well done using media attention for your benefit, you're handling the "controversy" well. Selling apps is a tough game and every user counts, good luck out there.

Thanks rafski, yep that was exactly why we created the app -- the appeal of something Gowalla-like, but without the social part.

Oh god, the video where you explain the meaning is hilarious, I am in tears here.

I am glad you have seen the funny site of things.

Man, they handled it well. The guy got the low-brow humor without acting particularly low-brow, which is a difficult thing to do. I wonder if.. they planned it? That would have been brilliant.

The thing is, it's probably one of those "only funny once" things, so I doubt that the next company trying it would be so successful. (That, and the original company, man, if they were planning it? they were /subtle/ - and that made it way better. It's totally believable as an accident. that'd be a difficult thing to follow up on.)

It will probably happen again, except the next time it will be intentional, and it will be successful in another country. Most people don't even hear about this stuff.

The video is currently not loading for me, so the below is just an observation on the linguistics of these situations not a troll to downgrade the humor contained herein.

This isn't the first time a brand has had to rethink its name to adjust to the local language. The Ford Pinto was re-dubbed when it entered Brazil because pinto in Portuguese is a word reserved for the male anatomy. It also happens the other way: the Nissan 350Z from the 80s was called the Fair Lady in Japan, which would likely never have resonated with its target demographic in the U.S.

I'd just like to point out that pinto only refers to the male anatomy in Brazil. Here in Portugal - and probably in other Portuguese speaking countries -, a "pinto" is just a young chicken.

Still a bad name for a car though. Also, I think the Pinto never made it to Brazil.

I guess they can be thankful for that. It was a terrible car.

I think the Corcel I was the Pinto, no?

The Chevy Nova is another oft-cited example; "No va" means "it doesn't go" in Spanish.

That story is apocryphal[1]. To use the example Snopes used, "nova" in Spanish doesn't mean "doesn't go" any more than "notable" means "no table" in English.

[1]: http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp

This has got to be one of the best (or worst, depending on your point of view) product names since the Windows phone named "Lumia". Lumia means prostitute in Spanish. I've always wondered how Nokia and MS missed that.

EDIT: I've just learned that "Siri" sounds like a word, 尻, that means "ass" in Japanese. [1]. So I suppose this is the funniest name since Siri.

[1]http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2394201,00.asp

Well the Siri name makes sense considering how it treats Japanese people: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiU8GPlsZqE

Siri means Crab in portuguese.. actually a sort of Crab.. The "Mr Krabs" from Sponge Bob its even named "Siriguejo" :)

Thanks everybody. Our first reaction was, "Oh what a disaster!" but then we thought, "Nothing we can do now, and it is pretty funny so let's just roll with it!" BTW, Rego is really being well received — it seems like a lot of people (us included!) needed something Gowalla-like but without the social part.

Yes, the Gizmodo article is hilarious!! I saw it shared on my Facebook timeline a lot!

For Gizmodo it is an absolute win - lots of sharing. For Rego, I am sure it is a short-term win. But at the long-term there are a lot of challenges to make the transition from novelty to consolidate, real value delivering app.

My 2 cents would be, keep the branding as a purpousely funny. Rego is a funny bad word, but not one that a newspaper can't publish. It's not that strong. Also it is very well known, but, at the same time, is not that commonly used so people won't associate it to a brand.

Just more 2 cents on this boring Saturday morning. If you launch it in portuguse and/or for Android, you should a great launch paying a tweet or post at https://twitter.com/kibeloco (they are very big here, and they are the funniest site by far). Another huge player on funny content is http://www.youtube.com/user/portadosfundos.

Just some tips if you decided to invest in this branding

Thanks for the tips, soneca

Do not go with kibeloco. They are known for stealing content. There is even a verb invented to describe stealing online content thanks to them: "kibar".

So what is Orkut slang for in Portuguese?

None. It is a completely strange word for us, our words normally doesn't end with a consonant (never with a 't') and we don't even use 'k' in our alphabet. I guess not even Google knows why it went so viral here. A proof of that is that now Facebook is by far the most used social network here (Google didn't even try to make Orkut -> GooglePlus transition, I don't know why).

Thanks for the language tip! I always wondered if there was some kind of local connection which made it work and was completely opaque to everyone back in Mountain View. It seems nobody knows, or if they know, they aren't telling.

Orkut was great stuff. Every time they went down, I'd get paged (if on call that week) because every single person in Brazil would go back to the login page and start submitting the form over, and over, and over...

I wasn't on-call for Orkut, but rather something else it depended on. All of that login load translated through to us. It got to the point where we'd interpret a load spike as "let's check Orkut" and when it got to "yep, it's down", we'd just ignore it.

Orkut was something like 5 years old before G+ was built. It has such a different social/sharing/privacy model, so it would be hard to convert, and it is only a major player in one country.

Ok, so "hard to convert" is a good enough reason to just ignore 40 million very active users.