Branding through naming

Just came across this interesting post from the website Facereviews that claims that Facebook (sought after by many silicon valley investors and the favorite pastime of teenagers, students and many a person who manage their online image through the user-friendly and ubiquitous application).

The point that Facereviews makes attests to the power of a name. Basically, it consists in saying that if Facebook was not called Facebook but, say, "classmates.com" or "schoolyearbook.com", it would not attract the people who do not fall into the "school" / "higher education" category.

I.e., the name conditions the brand. A name whose initial meaning is relatively unknown appeals broadly and creates the possibility for the application to become identified with the name.
Facebook is such an example.

Google is another one. To "google" someone or something is something that we all do, and the verb itself is a recent addition to ourvocabulary. We incidentally forgot that google got its name from the mispelling of "googol", which is the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros, indicating the search power of the engine.

And since we are there, the name recognition of yahoo is quite high, too. Who cares if it is actually the acronym for the long but always fun "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle", although the official history of the company insists that its two founders, Filo and Yang, also appreciated the meaning of yahoo as "rough, unsophisticated, uncough".

Semiology rules, again!