Habari
February 20th, 2007 by rickI don’t know much about Habari… I use Wordpress… like most other blogging softwares, I’ll take a look at it eventually I’m sure… but I’m sick sick sick sick of people being original and different…. just like EVERYONE else.
Habari is the Swahili word for News. Ubuntu is a word from an African language and no one is REALLY certain of the meaning. Joomla is an English-ization of the Swahili word (Jumla) for ‘all together’. Why? Why? Seriously… do we REALLY need more products named in African? I get it… I do, really.
I mean, it was clever the first time, it was non-annoying the second time, but now it seems like when you create a new trendy “WE NEED THE WEB TO EMBRACE THIS!!!1″ product, you basically brainstorm a list of 500 words that COULD have something to do with it, then search African languages until you find a word/language combination that creates the coolest sounding word, then you do about five minutes of research into the meaning of it, and make a marketing campaign showing how conscious you are of the global community blah blah blah. No, you’re an apologetic self-hating software developer who thinks everyone will think of you as worldly if you name your product a word you’ve likely never used in conversation and didn’t know existed until afore-mentioned name search process.
::EDIT:: All of that aside, it sounds like they have some talented people working on Habari… the name is the only thing I expect I will be disappointed with ::EDIT::
Posted in Technology |
March 7th, 2007 at 9:47 am
I agree with your premise, “different, but like everyone else”. Such an annoying concept and at times it becomes really difficult to keep myself from prematurely judging `those` people.
Yet, in the case of a product, it makes sense. Why compete with a billion other instances of common english words via google when launching your product?
Another problem one has when naming a project is NOT taking a competing entities name and seemingly running each element through a thesaurus for generating new iterations.
There are so many CMS’ out there right now and I dare you to forget that Joomla is one of them. Ubuntu is the same way.
Names like Ubuntu get people curious. They start conversations and people aren’t overloading other words they already use with the info you give them related to it’s name.
And FYI, the founder & funding behind Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth (http://www.markshuttleworth.com/biography/), is african and rich. =)
March 7th, 2007 at 10:00 am
Names like Ubuntu make people like my dad say, “Sounds like it’s made by a bunch of hippies.” Why does it all have to be African?
I think it’d be way cooler to have some blog software called Netzmaschinenbordbuch (that’s German for “web log”).