Twitter, which lets users broadcast short bloglike pronouncements via text message, instant message or e-mail, sought inspiration in nature.
"Every time I listen to birds, I get a sense of that short burst of information," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said.
With his second company, Ariel Maislos didn't want to repeat the problem he faced with his first, Passave Technologies. It was the Hebrew word for "broadband," which is what the chips the company made were designed to improve. But people complained they couldn't spell or say the name, pronounced Pa-SAH-vay.
So his new company, described so far as producing "a breakthrough technology that makes your phone conversations interesting," is as simple as a kid's lunchbox snack. It's called the Pudding.
"Everyone likes pudding," Maislos said.
Google too may have sounded silly in its early days, but the name developed a pedigree through good products, Twitter's Stone said. "If these things are around long enough, the name grows up," he said.
Internet entrepreneurs say the desperation to be unique is compounded by the need to simply own an Internet site.
Like Manhattan real estate, almost every conceivable, recognizable domain name has been scooped up in the hope that they'll be resold for big money. In two extreme examples, the rights to creditcheck.com recently sold for $3 million, and porn.com went for $9.5 million.
Internet companies have come up with tricks to capture Internet addresses, such as rejiggering the spelling of regular words: Drop a letter to make Flickr or insert odd punctuation, like Ma.gnolia and Del.icio.us.
And if the name doesn't catch on? This generation of Internet companies so embraces change -- "Internet time" is to regular time like dog years are to human years -- that it is not averse to changing identity if the name or business model don't work out. Riya became Like. Eefoof has been reborn as VuMe.
Name remorse is not uncommon. A few months ago, Bijan Marashi began to wonder if he had erred in giving his San Francisco start-up a name that loosely rhymed with "stupid."
Xoopit (pronounced ZOO-pit) was a riff on the word "soup," but it proved tricky to pronounce and for some, baffling to spell.
Then there was the typical parental fear: Would rival start-ups -- the bullies of the Internet playground -- call it "stupid" or make off-color jokes about a zoo pit?
