I've always wondered why the several company name changes lol... Several got super popular but then switched
I'm going to ramble.
Okay, so it was founded as "Madrona Park," after
Ted and Rosemary's favorite Seattle park. They were on the east coast at the time. The move to Seattle, the development of OpenTopic, and the rename to "Infopop Corporation" were one whole thing, and started & finished before my time as an employee.
We were Infopop Corporation in one office before the one I came to, which was on the west coast of Lake Union. Beautiful views, a couple good local restaurants. We'd then move across the street from Fisher Plaza, which if any of you have watched the TV series "Gray's Anatomy", will know as a hospital. It's a big complex adjacent to the Space Needle and also hosts the affiliate TV station for the network. The helipad is real, for their traffic copter. Our building was adjacent to the Chief Seattle statue, along the monorail line. Do you guys remember when we restyled the website and then Control Panel into the yellow pixel border style? The top level background design was part of a larger illustration that we had painted as mural on the front of the building. I'll see if I can find images of it later. I'm sure it was posted at the time, so it may well be in the news forum here!
Did I mention I was going to ramble?
Fisher Plaza also hosts a datacenter, the one we used of course. In 2002 we got a fiber internet connection to the datacenter across the street. It was so amazing, such an upgrade from DSL! If any of you were online for the Seattle datacenter fire that took out Expedia in the early 00s, it was that datacenter btw. They had another, worse fire a few years later. Furtherly aside, the servers we bought were first from Hard Drives Northwest, but a handful of their sales and engineering people left to found a company called Silicon Mechanics, whose servers we then bought. I worked for SiMech for just short of ten years, after leaving Infopop!
Back on topic. Next up was "Groupee, Inc." The switch from Corp to Inc had to do with individual investor buy-in and such, as far as I can tell from executive shuffling and such around the time. The name was the social network product. We tried, we really tried to get Ted to understand that "groupie" has a negative connotation but he was not online enough to understand possible mockery. Super chill dude until he's upset, in which case he's scary-chill. But he shrugged off worries like this one, in the same way he shrugged off the moves of our UBB[56]-class competitors. Oops.
Anyway. All that premiered after rename of the entire product line, with revamp of the OpenTopic frontend called Eve. We'd launch consumer-grade Eve as UBB.x, after UBB6 had been renamed UBB.classic, and WWWThreads/UBBThreads became UBB.threads.
Eve. Okay, look, he (and Rosemary) get really philosophical with their naming, and Eve was a result of that. The evening before the new day, and of course the Biblical reference. That's how we got Eve, according to what I remember of that meeting. It's not a bad name for a software product at all, but... for a community product? Na. Come on man. There has to be something better, something topical.
I was in one of the brainstorming sessions about naming the UBB.x product. Lordy we were so bad at naming. How the hell do you name "forum SaaS with web hosting glued on the side" for your target audience? I get how we got Eve.
You have to remember the Two Hard Problems In Computer Science:
- Cache invalidation
- Naming things
- Off-by-one errors
This is also how we got Social Strata. I wasn't there for the rename (I think?) but I am confident in the naming that it's Rosemary. I love Rosemary. She had a vision of community that was amazing and perfect in theory, but it's one of those things that you can pitch but never, ever works. We got enterprise customers for good reasons and I'm sure she was part of them. Moderation is hard.
Anyway. As far as I can tell they are still Social Strata, but the corporate community product that evolved out of the long-buried remains of OpenTopic is now called Crowdstack. Great name. It'd have been a much greater name ten years ago when it was the private label social network SaaS called "hoop.la".
Look, I'm not in the position to criticize naming. I'm the Please Name This Feature guy. I'm just riffing.
Our next, and my final, office was down the road on 4th between Wall and Battery. It was way too much space for a company our size and it confused the hell out of me. As I said, I was on the 3-midnight shift and man that place was lit super creepily at night in some spaces. Lovely in the daytime. It'd have been lovlier if we were all together instead of continuing to split the teams. I think we encountered a huge bunch of categories of problems because of the physical siloing of the teams by putting them on entirely different sides of the building. This happened in all three offices, though at least I was just around the corner from the Eve team, and Ted, in the second one.
I think that's all I've got on naming.
