After being “asked to rename Tweebay by a rather large corporate,” UK developer Paul Rawlings tells me he has decided to rename his Twitter marketplace Tweba. When I first wrote about Tweebay, a classifieds service that uses direct messages on Twitter to confirm bids, I wondered if “eBay might consider it a violation of its trademark.” The name effectively conveyed the idea that Tweebay was trying to be the eBay of Twitter, which was the problem. It was riding the coattails of an established brand.
Coming up with a good name for a startup or Web service is always tricky, but stay away from directly incorporating existing trademarks. Any company worth its salt will protect its trademark and ask you to stop. Then you’ll have to start all over again, like Rawlings is doing now with Tweba.
At least he’s relaunching with more features. Tweba now includes payments via Google Checkout or Paypal, feedback, and stores by category. The feedback is fairly straightforward. Buyers say whether or not they would buy again from a given seller, and vice versa. If you give a seller negative feedback and say that you wouldn’t buy again from them, then you are in fact barred from bidding on future items from that seller.
How did anybody notice this website when the site only has 30 total test auctions listed, all with 0 bids?
Who cares?
It will be good to make a redirect from http://www.tweebay.com/ to http://www.tweba.com . You will not be penalised as a duplicate content.
Easy: someone wrote about it on TechCrunch, which reminds me, this might infringe e couple of trademarks (one on “Tech” and the other on “Crunch”
)
Ya… Not a good idea to name your site after a successful one. That’s asking for problems.
This is a no brainer. I’m surprised it’s now TC filler.
No surprise! I have read man post, from people who try to dabble with domaining, about ebay sending them a domain “confiscation” letter, stating that ebay is a registered trade mark and they have so many days to release the domain to them, or else…
Twibay could have worked.
Someone already registered it last June: http://www.doma...amp;output=nice
Probably why he didn’t go with it in the first place, but yeah, it’s a better name.
Yeah no matter which way you slice it using “ebay” in any part of your name will create some sort of problem fro you eventually down the road.
When i set out and created (Tweebay) as it was formally known, it was done as a pet project to show how awesome Twitter was and what could be done in a relatively short space of time with some dev tools and an API.
We renamed to Tweba as what Tweba stands for seems to have sparked an interest in the communty with people asking for more and more features.
Not to mention Paul that it got you another article published on TC and some buzz for your product… great marketing job
Jon
http://Buzvia.com – Where’s Your Traffic Going?
I think they should change logo too, it tells absolutely nothing about the purpose of the service.
You mean like nearly 100% of logos? What does Google’s logo tell you about search, etc.?
I believe that the problem is leading to ebay, wich is somehow a competitor of the service
Either genius or stupid, the name got the site more fame and traffic than it deserves.
nice trick to get noticed.
Startups should be aware that the problem is limited to incorporating someone else’s trademark. If you adopt a name that looks the same, sounds the same or even means the same as the other guy’s trademark, you could be facing a problem.
tekcruncha
fabooka
microharda
yamahalo
appears theres still a lots of premium domains available.
LandrushLocator – ride the mine
Premium ? Are you nut ? Ask any lambda user to memoize these names and learn how to spell it. Oh noes, like hundred stupid web2.0 companies…
how about tweebo
Facebook sent me a cease and desist letter re my FacebookEconomy.com domain (and seem to have forgotten about it, it was last year =)
So posting it on TC will make sure they remember it and hassle you again (????).
Jon
http://Buzvia.com – Where’s Your Traffic Going?
what about this, what do you think?
http://amazonbe...t.blogspot.com/
I don’t see any problem here. If they had the guts, I bet they could have beat this in court. After all, ebay is just a Russian word that means F*** Off.
http://www.anec...x.php?aid=11755
Tewibay or whatever
will NEVER take off. eBay is a brand leader, and there is no point even trying to compete with it.
I am renaming my site to something more suitable. We are tech/gaming/entertainment… Can you please help me thing of anything – http://www.kennethwatt.com
Thanks
>>I am renaming my site to something more suitable. We are tech/gaming/entertainment… Can you please help me thing of anything
kennethwattisacluelesstwat.com?
What a sense of humout erfeerferf has
The twitter api is so sometimey…. why would they build such a service using that platform anyways?
Really… come on how do you lock your buyers in… ebay has a sense of security, in addition to owning the payment (paypal) system which deals with 90-some percent of the transactions…. How will tweeba compete….
Ebay may be a bit complex to the novice user… but knitted in that complexity (if you’d want to call it that) lies a very secure and reliable system that people trust.
Who knows… everyone is trying to make a new web startup these days…
well.. at least the BIRD logo is still in tact.. and in the end.. isn’t THAT what really matters?
what about names with ’space’?
i’ve seen a smaller social sites.
Thanks for listing this website. I was able to list my domain name for sale on Tweba, in addition to the traditional Craigslist.
http://twitter.com/tweetaday
I personally like the Twibay. Just my opinion.
http://www.thetechbasement.com
http://www.twit...thetechbasement
Tweba assumes that everyone knows what Twitter is and wants to use it.
Of all the people I know either through work or socially, I can think of just one person whom I know uses Twitter, vs about 75% who use or have used ebay…
Yep. Doesn’t matter what kind of clever name you come up with for a website, it really doesn’t make sense including brand names like ebay or google in the domain name because you are building you business on sand as supposed to on rock…
Greg
Is twitter not going to do the same in sometime? Or since they provide an API and most services are based on it, they are more liberal with people using their name to get popular?
Get Tweba mass follow/unfollow too free.