Simon Willison’s Weblog

Why do so many Internet sites end with the letter ’r’ (but not ’er’)?  Think about Tumblr, Dopplr, Migratr.  What’s behind this?

We just launched a project called lanyrd, which is a play on lanyard. We partly picked the name because the domain was available, but there’s actually a big advantage to using a made-up word: it’s really easy to search for coverage and feedback on Twitter, Google Blogsearch and the like. The string “lanyrd” is almost exclusively used to discuss our project—had we used a dictionary word, tracking down feedback would have been a lot harder.