I don’t know why but whenever (“whenevr” ?) I see these ads I just think “Whatever”.
Don Charisma, the critic – Great, so the guys at yahoo had a great idea, a photo website, let’s call it “Flicker”. On checking if the domain name was available, oh shit, it’s not, it’s already registered. What shall we do. And some bright spark comes up with the an idea, we can misspell it “flickr” rather than buying it fair and square from the legal owner, plus it will sound “cool”. Hmmm, no one visiting or using our site. What shall we do, how can we promote it? Ah, I know let’s start misspelling other “er” words in the same way with a cool picture, that’ll work.
Don Charisma, the promoter – Great job guys, every time I log into my email I see another misspelled word with a cool picture. You are brand promoter geniuses !
This picture appears now when I go to log in to my Yahoo email. I didn’t quite catch the previous picture, but will catch the next. Really guys, why not think of a decent brand name in the first place instead of trying to be cool ? At least they are trying I guess.
Don Charisma 
I think the real issue here is that you have a Yahoo email account (lol jk)
LOL, had it for years, what would you suggest as an alternative ?
I would say Gmail or iCloud’s @me.com are two ways to go depending on what operating system you have on your devices (I use gmail and have no complaints). The benefit is seamlessly integrating your email with ever-improving other services/apps into one account, while the downside is that you start to have a lot of your information on one of these company’s servers. Depending on how much you are skeptical of Google as big brother, the convenience might be worth it.
I do have already googlemail and icloud addresses. The reasons I didn’t use them are – yahoo familiar been using for years as you know. @Googlemail.com is a bit on the long side, which might push me to the @me.com side of things. However don’t want to get too dependant on the Apple technolosphere mainly due to price, but have had other issues with them such as features that just disappear from their software in upgrades without any/much warning, and no accountability for this.
As for big brother aspect, not sure that I’m ‘protected’ by using yahoo. I’ve declined for instance for linkedin and facebook to search my email for contacts, and yet they still make suggestions based on people that have emailed me several years ago. One explanation is that others have made their email contacts available to facebook and linkedin, but presumably that wouldn’t exactly be an ethical way of using other people’s contacts.
Bottom line is that any and all digital communications are “insecure”, even the hardest encryption can be broken in some cases just simply by strong arming the key holder. The average person doesn’t have the facility to strong arm people, but governments and powerful corporations do (and others). I’m fairly sure that collectively most people understand that their communications aren’t secure, so tend to censor themselves, or that’s how it seems. As for google as big brother I’ve heard stories, and often it pays to treat these kinds of things with respect – Ie act as if they were true, even if they are not.
So for now I stick with yahoo, even though it may not be optimal.
Gives new meaning to “to r is human”
Exactly, or even “to rr is human”
Spectaculr, Biggr, Wherevr, what these guys been smoking I don’t know !
It is part of the whole generation (and I am not talking about people, but rather a technological generation) of using acronyms and misspelling everything. I have worked in the legal for 10 years and I have seen the quality of court documents plummet, quickly. They either get all weird on the Word special effect (what I call ‘fairytale letters’ for some attorneys), or they have staff which do not know what the red line means under a word. I have even heard some people say they turn off that feature as they don’t like the lines under their words. It is a whole slue of people who just are too damn lazy to check spellings, use an extra letter, or check grammar. What gets me are the ones where they leave out one letter, only one, and it is suddenly a ‘cool’ word as you implied.
Great piece.
Peace
Hey Rene, thanks for your message. There are arguments in either direction.
The SMS text messaging has partly contributed to this, which was fair enough with the limited characters and people wanting to save money on sending messages. Twitter only has 160 characters, why I’m not quite sure, so arguably it’s defend’able here too. Also language does evolve whether we like it or not, however not personally sure that dropping vowels is a step forward, after our scholars have spend 100s of years trying to improve our languages.
The thing I don’t like is that language is ambiguous enough already, often, very often leading to misunderstandings, and taking vowels out just makes it possible for more misunderstanding. Good relationships are it’s usually said are based on good clear communication, so this does affect our relationships with others, in a negative way. I can also see a potential shift in responsibility for the communication to the receiver, and personally I don’t feel it’s receivers responsibility to take on any more responsibility than they already have in terms of interpreting a communication. It’s the originator who wanted to communicate a message and their responsibility to ensure they’ve done their due diligence prior to sending that communication (spell check, grammar, context, cultural understanding etc).
Eventually where do we end up, I use whatever characters I like to send a message, what does this say – “fjshfkj hdjfh sdjfh kjdshfkjdsh fjkdsh roieowir”, nothing actually just a bunch of random characters that a monkey with a typewriter could have written. And you as the recipient have to do extra work trying to figure out what the hell I’m on about, as if our lives weren’t busy enough already.
What gets me about “flickr” is that they’ve kept one vowel and got rid of another, why didn’t they call it “flckr” ? And the other thing is that they have to spend time, money and effort making it sound cool, when really, is it cool ?
Bottom line, I just thought it was/is dumb, that’s why I posted about it. Interesting to see what other’s make of it !
Thanks
Don Charisma
Thanks for the reply.
I love the funnies they have showing phone messages messed up or where acronyms were used and the receiver has no idea what they mean. They are funny, but when I was texting, I used the whole word and turned off that stupid autofill, or whatever it is called.
I see on FB every once in a while the paragraph were the first and last letter are correct, but the letters are not right in the middle of the word. This is supposed to show us how wonderfully smart we are if we can read this. As I have read it a few times, I finally came to the conclusion, that it was rather to show us how lazy we could be in learning how to read and write and yet our brains are supposed to make up the difference.
It is also very confusing to someone who is trying to learn our language. I have heard from some who know many languages, English in America is one of the hardest to learn. I can see why it would be. Also, I have heard that if you were solely raised on American English it is very hard to learn another language in adulthood. I am not sure about this, but it is what I have heard.
Great discussion.
Rene, generally I’ve always tried to use correct grammar and spelling, but I do use shortcuts too, we all do to a certain extent, hence acronyms and shortened names … FBI instead of Federal Bureau of Investigations and Don or D instead of Donald … that kind of thing …
The autofill I have on iphone occasionally irritates me, but my fingers aren’t exactly those of a petite asian girl, so I do often make typos on iphone and autofill helps me to write faster and better. Largely I prefer to communicate with grown ups using whole words and sentences, FB I’m not a great fan of, as I don’t get any real authentic communications there. I’ve said before maybe this is a dude thing, I have male friends who don’t have FB account (and probably never will), but do have linkedin for instance. Twitter in some ways I prefer to FB. WordPress is more my kind of thing. However as a internet professional, one can’t ignore any/all of avenues to promote, so have FB page/profile, Twitter, linkedin, pininterest, and so on, it’s a long list !
The English are quite amused by the Americans calling it “English”, and also reckoning that their English is a more “correct” version. English is from England and I’m afraid the English people know how to speak it and write it, we have been a lot longer than Americans. Perhaps start calling it “American” ? But I guess that might annoy the natives !
The other thing we do find quite amusing is, an American might describe himself (or herself) as “Irish”. Turns out that he was born in the US, his parents were born in the US, his grandparents were born in the US, only his great grandparents were born in Ireland. Dude in the UK, or really anywhere else in the world you’re “American”. How does the fact that your great grandparents were born in Ireland make you Irish ? I mean if I had a great-great-great-great-great grandparent from Poland, do I get to call myself Polish ?
Cultural differences don’t you just love ’em ! Sorry I digressed a little bit there, and obviously no offence mean’t…
I can only speak from my own personal experience learning languages. Generally speaking I’ve found women better at it. I have a suspicion that’s down males not being so sharp on emotional intelligence, not because we’re not just as capable, but because males not generally encouraged to explore their emotions so much. Also generally speaking women tend to communicate more. English (American or English English) is a very ambiguous language. I just don’t know if it would be harder to learn than any other language, each of which has it’s own obstacles. I know a little bit of Spanish, Thai, Italian, French, German in probably that order of proficiency, not that I could have more than a hello, thankyou, goodbye conversation in any of those languages. I learn slowly and through repetition, and really to become fluent, I’d be looking at studying full time and living in a country for at least a year.
great discussion, very interesting:)
TC
DC
I wonder if they may be spelling it that way for trademark reasons. I’ve heard it can be easier to get a trademark on a mispelling, since it’s harder to confuse with a real word.
I.e. mis-spelling it as “biggr” may make the word harder to understand, but it makes it easier to tell the ad is from Flickr.
Could well be the case…presumably you mean “easier” as in cheaper, which wasn’t exactly what I said, but close !
I got the idea of misspelling the idea, from a marketeers point of view… just thought it was a bit pathetic really, especially from someone like yahoo with the resources they have available 🙂