This was the information I found on the origin of:
TwitterTwitter's origins lie in a "daylong brainstorming session" that was held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. While sitting in a park on a children’s slide and eating Mexican food, Dorsey introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group.The original project code name for the service was twttr, inspired by Flickr and the five-character length of American SMS short codes.
Google was born in the Gates Computer Science Building at Stanford University by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. In 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin called their initial search engine "BackRub," named for its analysis of the web's "back links." ean and Larry were in their office, using the whiteboard, trying to think up a good name - something that related to the indexing of an immense amount of data. Sean verbally suggested the word "googolplex," and Larry responded verbally with the shortened form, "googol" (both words refer to specific large numbers). Sean was seated at his computer terminal, so he executed a search of the Internet domain name registry database to see if the newly suggested name was still available for registration and use. Sean is not an infallible speller, and he made the mistake of searching for the name spelled as "google.com," which he found to be available. Larry liked the name, and within hours he took the step of registering the name "google.com" for himself and Sergey (the domain name registration record dates from September 15, 1997).
Facebook, (according to wikipedia) is the name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the USA to help students get to know each other better.
Yahoo: The word "Yahoo" was invented by Jonathan Swift for the Travels. He and his friends used the word among themselves while Swift was writing he book, appearing in their correspondence.The name Yahoo! purportedly stands for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," but Jerry Yang and David Filo insist they selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos.
Yelp: Means to give a quick, sharp, shrill cry, as a dog or fox.Yelp was founded in 2004 to help people find great local businesses like dentists, hair stylists and mechanics.As of January 2011, more than 45 million people visited Yelp in the past 30 days. David Galbraith (a guy in Max's incubator MRL Ventures who was helping us with Yelp in the early days) found it on his own. It was available for purchase from a squatter for 5k. Russ and I didn't immediately like the name since it was "the sound of a dog being kicked" and I was strangely enamoured with "yocal" - a terrible name. Fortunately Scott Bannister (another guy hanging out in the incubator, who was also involved in the naming of PayPal) immediately loved it. He told us he'd buy it and sell it to us the next day when we came to our senses. In the ensuing discussion Jared Kopf (yet another incubator employee) put down his credit card and actually bought the domain. The next day it was transfered to the company (we paid back Jared) and the rest is history.
Wikipedia: Wiki" means quick in Hawaiian. The Wiki Wiki Bus is Honolulu International Airport's shuttle, and has shuttled people between the Main Terminal and the Domestic/International Terminals since the mid-1960s.The "pedia" part is from the word encyclopedia.Wikipedia, then, means to go to a quick encyclopedia. Wiki websites like Wikipedia and WikiAnswers (not related) run on wiki software which allows for collaborative editing and easy creation of pages.
Amazon: Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com, Inc. in 1994 and the site went online in 1995. The company was originally named Cadabra, Inc., but the name was changed when it was discovered that people sometimes heard the name as "Cadaver". The name Amazon.com was chosen because the Amazon River is one of the largest rivers in the world, and so the name suggests large size, and also in part because it starts with "A" and therefore would show up near the beginning of alphabetical lists. Amazon.com started as an online bookstore, but soon diversified, selling DVDs, CDs, MP3 downloads, computer software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, and toys. Amazon has established separate websites in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and China. It also provides international shipping to certain countries for some of its products.
There is somewhat of a science in naming a business in the internet, because several founders changed their company's name at the end. From my searches I found that most companies name's were linked with what the company does, and there was a lot of thought, time, energy on naming the company. Its something to definitively take into consideration. I learned that most people like simple names that they can remember, in order to use it periodically.
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