Have you ever wondered how Twitter, Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Yelp!, Wikipedia, and Amazon got their names? I have, heres a little history on the origin of these names. Is there a science to naming internet business?

From the Twitter entry on Wikipedia, co-founder Jack Dorsey explains:
"We wanted to capture that in the name -- we wanted to capture that feeling: the physical sensation that you're buzzing your friend's pocket. It's like buzzing all over the world.
"So we did a bunch of name-storming, and we came up with the word 'twitch,' because the phone kind of vibrates when it moves. But 'twitch' is not a good product name because it doesn't bring up the right imagery.
"So we looked in the dictionary for words around it, and we came across the word 'twitter,' and it was just perfect. The definition was 'a short burst of inconsequential information,' and 'chirps from birds.'
"And that's exactly what the product was."

 

In my search on how google got its name this is what I found:

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google, they wanted a name that conveyed the idea of the huge amounts of information that is available on the internet. It is a play on the math term "googol" which is a 1 followed by 100 zeros.The reason they wanted to call it Google was that it was their goal to reach that many websites.

 

Heres some information on the history of how Facebook got its name.

The internet site Facebook.com is based on paper directories of members of an organization (typically students), featuring mug shots, names (indexed by first and last name and other useful indicators) and brief descriptions of them. These face books are used so students and professors in new classes can recognize each other. It was a logical extension to call a web site performing a similar function by the same name.

The internet site Facebook.com is based on paper directories of members of an organization (typically students), featuring mug shots, names (indexed by first and last name and other useful indicators) and brief descriptions of them. These face books are used so students and professors in new classes can recognize each other. It was a logical extension to call a web site performing a similar function by the same name.

After searching about how Yahoo! got its name this is what I found.

The Web site started out as "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. The name Yahoo! is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, "Akebono," while the software was lodged on Filo's computer, "Konishiki" - both named after legendary sumo wrestlers.

 

Heres some history on how Yelp! got its name.

David Galbraith (a guy in Max's incubator MRL Ventures who was helping us with Yelp in the early days) found it on his own. It was available for purchase from a squatter for 5k. Russ and I didn't immediately like the name since it was "the sound of a dog being kicked" and I was strangely enamoured with "yocal" - a terrible name. Fortunately Scott Bannister (another guy hanging out in the incubator, who was also involved in the naming of PayPal) immediately loved it. He told us he'd buy it and sell it to us the next day when we came to our senses. In the ensuing discussion Jared Kopf (yet another incubator employee) put down his credit card and actually bought the domain. The next day it was transfered to the company (we paid back Jared) and the rest is history.

 

After looking up the origin of wikipedia I found two answers.

 One is Wikipedia is a portmanteau, that is, a word made up from two different words, in this case 'wiki', a computer technology for websites, and 'encyclopedia' (encyclopaedia, in Commonwealth English), a compendium of knowledge. Thus, Wikipedia.
 Two

"Wiki" means quick in Hawaiian. The Wiki Wiki Bus is Honolulu International Airport's shuttle, and has shuttled people between the Main Terminal and the Domestic/International Terminals since the mid-1960s.
The "pedia" part is from the word encyclopedia.
Wikipedia, then, means ----> quick encyclopedia
Wiki websites like Wikipedia and WikiAnswers (not related) run on wiki software which allows for collaborative editing and easy creation of pages.
Some people believe wiki stands for "What I Know Is" but that is a false acronym.