Why is Twitter called Twitter?

When cofounder Biz Stone saw the application that Jack Dorsey created in 2006 he was reminded of the way birds communicate: “Short bursts of information…Everyone is chirping, having a good time.” In response, Stone came up with ‘twttr’, and the group eventually added some vowels.

It’s hard to think of a more evocative name in the tech world than twitter, but what began as what Stone described as “trivial” bursts of communication developed into a powerful means of networking, breaking news, and forum for the 44th US president’s campaign.

Why is Orkut called Orkut?

orkut.com is a social networking service named after the Google engineer who developed it, Orkut Buyukkokten. (Orkut is easier to spell and pronounce than Buyukkokten.)

I also looked up his profile on Orkut (obviously), why would he be on facebook… or is he?
Orkut Buyukkokten

Why is Facebook called Facebook?

From what we know is Mark Zuckerberg purchased the domain “facebook.com” in 2005, the website was previously linked to “thefacebook.com”, but it still is a mystery why Mark choose the name “thefacebook” in the first place?

Was it because of Mark got inspired by “AboutFace electronic facebook” by Atlantic Media Corporation which is considered the pioneer of social networking sites, using electronic directories to allow businesses to help workers and managers associate names with the faces of their employees. 

—still looking for answers—

Why is MySpace called MySpace?

—still looking for answers—

Why is LinkedIn called LinkedIn

—still looking for answers—

Why is Bebo called Bebo

—still looking for answers—

Why is hi5 called hi5

—still looking for answers—

Why is Ning called Ning?

Ning means “peace” in Chinese, as explained by Gina Bianchini on the company blog and it is also a surname in Chinese.

Read More[Ning Blog]

So, that’s their story.

What’s yours? How did you come up with the name for your network or company? Any words of wisdom for new Network Creators or other entrepreneurs?

I got a twitter from a friend of mine asking me to nominate him @itwote. I got surprised and thought this was one more of those reality type “vote me tweets” but i decided to dig deeper and found a very unique initiative.

The idea was to choose the most popular twitter user from India. And by popular, it meant not the user with the most tweets, but rather the one who’s so popular on twitter, that everyone loves him.

The process involved a nomination of a week after which 5 contestants with most votes were shortlisted, their profiles were put of on the website and then other users had to vote for their choice of “twitterguru”.

The Top 5 nominees were (twitter names used)

• @vimoh - 37 twotes
• @dhempe - 30 twotes
• @Abhilash - 27 twotes
• @aDeSe -11 twotes
• @Archit -9 twotes

The statistics if you look at it are quite impressive. The majority of high trafficked social networks have either embraced open social or are along the path of implementing open social containers. The question that I think about is, Yes! Open Social did to some extent make it easier for developers to create social applications that would “in theory” work across different social networks. But do users really want the same social applications across all the major social networks? , does one really need a “Slapster” for Facebook ? , do applications aimed for Linkedin users would be as attractive for users on MySpace? Some may agree that we do, but simplifying access to social networks and its users is a good first step but is it going to be enough? a year from now ??

I think be it Open Social, Facebook or our own Big Adda, Rediff Social, all need to provide meaningful opportunities so that social application developers see a measurable Return on Investment (ROI) for social application they have developed. It could start for example with a simple micropayments capability supported by FB or other Open Social Implementors; that would lead to revenues flowing to Social Application developers.

It remains to be seen if new revenue models emerge to make it worthwhile for high quality and useful social applications to be continually developed - However this is one area that I would like to read about more as Open Social turns two !!

Most of the activities for Opensocial Developer Garage had caught pace but the question of which application to be developed for the CodeLab event still remained a mystery. So shardul came up with the idea of developing the application titled India I care.

India I care A Campaign to Replenish “The Character Bank Of India” located at panchgani. Millions of Indians battle poverty and oppression o a daily basis,their lives in darkness with few signs of hope. Corruption, division, injustice have eaten into the heart of this great civilization. Unless we shift the ‘me-first’, ‘me-only’ mindset from ‘grab’ to ‘give’, our economic growth will only create bigger graps in our country and we’ll wreck our chances of making this nation truly great.

So to help the nation they came up with an idea of “character bank of India”. Its a virtual bank where people  make deposits , the deposits will not be in the form of money but in the form of oath. Like if a person says “He’ll not give or take bribes” and for some reason he has to come across a situation where he/she were forced to give or take bribe but resisted, thus making a difference, this act would be qualified as a person’s deposit. He/She can even make multiple deposits at a time, this deposits if followed by every person can bring change in them as well as surroundings and slowly in whole nation.

Shardul had previous discussions with arpana about the CodeLab event and the application we could develop during CodeLab. So to discuss this application she called us to their iofc centre panchgani . I (Vishal) and shardul went to the iofc centre on Sunday 9^th November 08 were Arpana welcomed us.  Arpana wanted to give us some idea about India i care , before actually going through the application they needed to make. So she showed us the whole centre that covers an area around 60 acres and explained every bit of it.

Then we meet Mayur,Priya, Mr.Mike Brown who’s father had created and donated the whole architecture of asia plateau. During our lunch we actually started discussing about the application. We first gave short description about what is the event about and how can codelab would benefit them.

After lunch we took their views regarding the application. There were plenty of features would could add to application but due to restriction in time we had to cut short and focus on only the crucial aspects of the app.We prepared a rough design so that we could share it with other organizers.

After plenty of corrections, confusion, arguments and thought regarding the final product we had a mockup ready on the white board. We all were so excited about the application and event that nobody amongst us got bored during the entire course of the discussion. The whole discussion lasted for around 6 hrs with 2 breaks.

We left asia plateau at 6.15 pm with the promise of making the application possible and fully developed during the CodeLab of Developer Garage.

Only discussions kept happening and nothing fruitful happened (no sponsors on board, the website was still not up, the ODG logo was not setup, and many more of these).  We had the speaker registration form ready but did not have a place to put it up.

It seemed at a point that no event was going to happen since we never arrived on any conclusions. I did book the domain developergarage.in and shared the credentials but somehow no one really (including me) had to time to go and upload pages and write content.

It looked very shady and since i was away i could not do a lot from there but we knew there was enough time and a faith of having so many pro people in the organizer team.

The meeting was attend by Me, Vishal Gadkari, Shardul Mohite,Amit Karpe,Rakshit, Pravin,Prasoon Kumar, Amit Kumar Singh, Priyank. The main agenda of the meet was how to make the 1st Open Social Developer Garage’08 a successful event.

Finally, we arrived at some conclusions:-

Open Social Developer Garage’08 conference would be held in Pune on 20th December. The venue of the event is yet to be decided. There was a very big conversation on Sponsored vs Non-Sponsored events and we finally choose and “invite only” event.

We would invite speakers and social app developers from across the country and have them as participants or speakers. Also few of them would get a chance to showcase their applications in front of everyone. The plan to host a codelab was also discussed.

We were all excited by the fact that, the first steps had been taken to make the event possible and a it seemed like the dream would come true!

The Seeding of Opensocial Developer Garage

I attended PHPCamp the biggest un-conference in the country a few months ago and it came to my notice that the event had almost 40% of the talks on Opensocial and how to write social apps. I was amazed to see so many people interested in building applications for the orkut platform and they seemed very keen to know how they could use the social graph.

The great event came to an end and we all wished there was more of Opensocial and related talks.

The Inside Story

Soon after PHPCamp, the next big event was The Google Developer Day, being a social apps developer myself i immediately applied for a seat to the event. I remember i registered on the very first day and i was damn sure i was going to get in.

Many Days passed by and i finally thought i got a confirmation but this is what i got

Subject: Sorry, we’ve run out of space at Google Developer Day

Message: “Thank you for your interest in Google Developer Day India.  Due to huge demand we unfortunately have run out of space and are unable to accommodate your registration this year.  We encourage you to check out our new APIs and Developer Tools on code.google.com. Hope to see you next year.

Sincerely,
Google Developer Team

This was not at all a pleasant email to me ,but i thought it was quite alright for not inviting me since it’s “google” and it was “developer day india”. So, i just decided to move on…

The very next hour the idea struck me “it’s ok if google does not have a seat for me, let me invite google developers to my event and a space would definitely be there for them” and we called the organizer meeting.

This was the real beginning of Opensocial Developer Garage’08,Pune

I reside in Pune, India and run Social Web Factory, a company that specializes in helping people build their brand presence on social networking platforms. I am a major in computer engineering  with deep interests in social web, emerging platforms & content arround them.

The Story of InsideSocialWeb.

Well, i have been watching & reading people’s blogs over the internet but never could really sit & jot things down. Time kept passing by until the moment i found one of my favourite blogs on the internet (insidefacebook.com). After following it for months and being in the social web space for quite sometime i thought i should share my experience with the community. So, i went straight to GoDaddy.com and bought the domain insidesocialweb…took me almost a week to finalize on this one. Got wordpress on the domain and yahoo! we have a blog.

The Purpose.

I guess the name says it all insidesocialweb…The main focus was to have an aggregated blog which specializes in tracking social web and related content over the web.  This blog will also focus on tracking the social web space in India and would also be a place where user’s will post apps related to localized content also i would be continuously reviewing & sharing my thoughts about them. The blog would also at a later point of time allow startups/companies to do job posts and hence connect to the talent pool.