“Maka Maka” Worst Name to Date for Web Project

You’ve got to wonder how many hours the mad G-scientists were holed up in their cubbyholes working on the new project that is going to be released soon – you know, the one that made them go "ha, ha, IF YOU ONLY KNEW" when the news came out about Microsoft taking a stake of Facebook. And roll their eyes when the Economist reported last week that "the future of social networking will not be one big social graph but instead myriad small communities." What? smaller is better?

Back to Maka Maka. It’s only a rumor, the first stage of which (OpenSocial) is merely not-yet-live link,  but already the project has been declared, in the usual dramatic fashion, a "major assault on the social networking scene," with a call for API’s that will "out-open" Facebook.

From TechCruch:

The bigger vision is to combine all of Google’s apps and services
through Maka-Maka. Google already has so much data on you, depending on
how many Google apps you already use. It just needs to bring everything
together. Your contacts are in Gmail. Your feeds are in Google Reader.
Your IM buddy list is in Gtalk. Your upcoming events are in Google
Calendar. Your widgets are in iGoogle. And don’t forget about your
search history.

Over time, Google will connect all of these together in
different ways, along with data about you from other social services
across the Web, and give developers access to the social layer tying
all of these apps together underneath. The real killer app for Google
is not to turn Orkut into a Facebook clone. It is to turn every Google
app into a social application without you even noticing that you’ve
joined yet another social network.

You also have to wonder how many hours the Namers (because there MUST be an in-house person whose job is just to come up with ridiculous names for these things) spent trying to figure out what to call it.

Might this be their reference? I’d prefer it over the real one. The Unofficial Facebook blog has this to say:

When you say a guy made a ‘maka’ in Israel, it means that he made a
great deal and earned a lot of money, really fast.” Looks like Google
is trying to prepare the Facebook knock out.

But, as they do point out, it’s not quite ready. We’ll cross our fingers. Though, as-seen-in-SFGate, "…keep in mind that there’s a Google rumor per week these days and
the company, although dominant in search, has a track record of
releasing new products that fail to live up to the inevitable hype."

OUCH!

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.