Why Flickr has no "e" 17 Sep 2007

Over at 90 Percent of Everything, Harry Brignull explains why Flickr has no "e". Apparently, George Oates decribed the name's origin during her presentation at d.construct 2007, although it was first mentioned in a CBS interview earlier this year:

"In an age of curious-sounding Web-site names, 'Flickr' came largely by accident. The domain owner of 'flicker.com' wouldn't sell, so Caterina suggested 'Flickr,' which Butterfield says made the service stand out. 'We always had to spell it out for people, which helped make it stick,' he notes."

Hmmm...omitting the "e" certainly introduces some sort of "novelty factor" - which in turn creates a degree of memorability - but there are significant disadvantages associated with this approach too. As Brignull points out, sites with Web 2.0 names - like Flickr.com - lose a lot of traffic to their correctly-spelled counterparts - like Flicker.com - as new (and inexperienced) users typically assume the dictionary spelling when attempting to locate these sites.

It is interesting to note that del.icio.us decided to make the switch to delicious.com (i.e. no Web 2.0-style punctuation) a couple of weeks back. Seems like they've realised that they need to simplify if they want to make the leap from techies-only-adoption to mass-adoption.