Best + Stuff = Bestuff
Posted by Luke
You may have noticed something interesting happening to our URL address? Yep, you’ve guessed it, we’re changing our name to Bestuff.com
“But why the change to Bestuff?”
We’ve been thinking about shortening our name for a while now. Having a URL name that’s 22 letters long may not have been the smartest move on our behalf. Initially we thought that sometimes the most obvious name is the best and it’s kind of cute in a simple down-to-earth way, however there’s a few drawbacks:
- It’s a damn long name. Real long. I get cramped fingers typing it out, although maybe that’s just me just getting old.
- If we use a regular sized subdomain ( i.e. movies.thebeststuffintheworld.com ) then that starts becoming an even sillier length of characters.
We want to have a wanky Web 2.0 name!- Typing out our acronym TBSITW is just as annoying as writing out our full name.
- Look, it’s just a really long name, ok?
“Ok, ok, we get it. But what does Bestuff mean?”
When Adrian and I first built the site, we had no idea how it would actually be used. Initially, we thought it might become a consumer-driven product review website where people shared their favourite things and advised others about consumer stuff. Like an online ‘customer choice’ magazine. How wrong were we?! Among the first stuff to be added to the site was:
- “1 hour of good and relaxing sex”
- “Splashing in puddles”
- “To Crush Your Enemies, See Them Driven Before You, And To Hear The Lamentation Of The Women!”
- “When everything works out OK”
All in the category The Best Things in Life!
As the site evolved we realized that by adding ‘best stuff’ we were creating an inventory of all the things that made us individuals. Looking at member profiles became like peeking in someone’s shopping trolley at Safeway, or looking through the books on their shelf. The Best Stuff in the World had developed a social dimension that we could never have anticipated.
Taking this into account, we thought about the name change long and hard as we didn’t want to move away too far from “the Best Stuff in the World”, but we wanted something short and sweet. Since our central focus is “Best Stuff”, we just combined the two words together to form bestuff. Also as the site became a personal list of favorite stuff, ‘bestuff’ can also be taken as ‘be stuff’, as in “you are what you like”.
The change from thebeststuffintheworld.com to bestuff.com is not only URL expedient, it captures (we hope) the way the site has mutated into a place where people truly do discover and share the best things in life, and how that process defines them as an individual.
We think that the name change is a good thing, we hope you do too!
