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?

8th September 2010

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

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.