Top Ten Rules for Web Startups

A few friends and colleagues have linked to Evan William's Ten Rules for Web Startups. My initial reaction was to ignore the link, but eventually I got around to reading them. I was pleasantly surprised to find this gem about descriptive naming:

"Get a good, non-generic name. Easier said than done, granted. But the most common mistake in naming is trying to be too descriptive, which leads to lots of hard-to-distinguish names."

The reason I keep harping on this point is that Evan is right - the tendency to choose descriptive names for a product or company is one of the hardest instincts to overcome.