How a Good Name Turns out to be Crap – Literally

(Updated)
TechCrunch gave a pretty positivie review of Jobby:
“Unlike other web 2.0 job sites like Indeed and Simply Hired (which aggregate job listings from around the web), Jobby takes information directly from job seekers, and then focuses on helping recruiters filter through job qualifications fast via tagging and tag filtering. The results are quite stunning”

A good review by Mike always helps, so all is fine for the beta-service … except … hm… apperently the name has a special meaning in Scottish slang:
“A Scots term for the brownish substance excreted from ones anus when the bowels are full or after a spicy cuisine.
Also the term for something that is disapproved of/ rubbish.” (source: Urban Dicitionary).

Yuck. That’s pretty bad. The Jobb(y)ers are lamenting the right course of action:
“So what’s the solution? The way I see it, we have three options.
1. Change our name.
2. Keep our name. Grin and bear it. After all, we showed the site to hundreds of people before anyone actually pointed this out. It’s pretty obscure… Right?
3. Change our logo to a little amorphous brown man in a lively plaid kilt.”

My vote is on #2, keep the name. Although I’d like to see someone come up with #3.

Update : I guess now it’s fair to say these surfers in Hawaii had a jobby experience

Update (3/31): Here’s a thorough data-driven analysis into how sh*t (I mean “jobby”) happens. More here, and from Guy Kawasaki.

Update (5/24): Jobby no longer… they got acquired by Jobber. Hope the deal was not … “jobby” (in Scottish). Congrat’s to the team.

Update (7/16/07): Read/WriteWeb has a run-down of the 10 worst app names.

Tags: Jobby, job-search, indeed, simply hired, techcrunch, slang, urban dictionary, domains, domain names