Democracy Player becomes 'Miro'

Filed under: Internet, Video, Open Source

Democracy Player becomes 'Miro'

by Brian Liloia Mar 12th 2007

What's in a name? Lots of things, including the difference between confusing and creating potential users of your application, apparently. That's why the Participatory Culture Foundation is renaming Democracy Player, its internet television surfing program, despite sticking with the original for over a year.

"In all our debates about whether you could call something 'Democracy' and how people would react to the name, we hadn't realized that so many people would simply assume that the software was for politicians and videos about politics."

The new name will be Miro, which means, well... we don't know. But anyway, there's a lesson to be learned here. If you've got a potentially creative, but ultimately too specific and image-burdened name for your software, think twice about it. You can't always expect casual users to look beyond the name of an application to see its real use. So, lose the cool symbolism at the expense of losing users. Check out the official word from the folks themselves to get the full lowdown.

Tags: democracy, internet tv, InternetTv, open source, OpenSource, software

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

SAGExSDX said 6:52PM on 3-12-2007

well if it's spanish, miro is the first person singular conjugation of "mirar" which means "to see, to watch".

az said 7:37PM on 3-12-2007

actually miro means "I look at"

SAGExSDX said 8:10PM on 3-12-2007

oh yeah... "veo" is "i see" right?

Brian Liloia said 9:19PM on 3-12-2007

Wow, yea. I should have totally known that. Four years of Spanish - what? Er... I suppose I wasn't thinking hard enough...

zack said 3:41PM on 3-13-2007

maybe they should focus on making it stable before they devote any effort into a marketing campaign. i love the concept, but it's a clunky beast.

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