I’ve only named one really successful web-site in my life. Way back in the heady days of 2008 a [not so] young blogger had decided to throw in his job at vertigo software and team up with Joel Spolksy to create a new Q&A site that was to be the antithesis of the popular-but-hated expertsexchange. That [not so] young man was Jeff Atwood and when it came time to find a name for his site he turned to some of the best experts in branding and marketing on the internet for suggestions. They were all busy, so he ended up emailing Leon Bambrick AKA the secretgeek and myself whose work he had long plagiarized admired.
One of the names I suggested was stackoverflow.com, which ended up being chosen as the ‘winning’ name in a poll on Jeff’s blog. It’s amusing to look back at the list of other names I suggested, and also to note that I preferred one of the other suggestions on Jeff'’s list - gosub10.com – to any of my own.
Of course when it came time to name the next system-administration-centric site in the growing Atwood-Spolsky empire they knew who to turn to. But once again those guys were busy so they asked me (as well as a bunch of other people). I liked Phil Haack’s suggestion of rackoverflow.com (but it has weird connotations). This time the best I could come up with was nextnextdone.com. I can’t imagine why they never went with that one, and chose serverfault.com instead.
