Yahoo!
Before Yahoo! became a search engine and a new entity, it was merely an idea that two PhD students had as they studied at Stanford University. And even though David Filo and Jerry Yang had a fantastic idea, they could not think of an excellent name for it. It was initially named Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web, and even though they changed the name to something just as long, it still came with an acronym. It was named Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle, or just Yahoo.
Yahoo!
It was unfortunate that the decision to find the name for Twitter could not be summarized into 140 characters. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder, had to use a few tweets to explain the company’s name. The intention was for Twitter to be an SMS texting-based service and told that the meaning of the name “came from a dictionary: short inconsequential bursts of information; chirps from birds.” They chose to name it twttr, but the code was already taken. They placed the vowels back and said, “thus lost our web 2.0 cool.”
