We’ve done our best to make this transition as painless as possible for our early adopters. Please let us know if anything is broken. Our goal is for everything to keep working for you as it was, just with the exciting new name and brand. Thanks!
We agree with you all too! We know that rebranding this much might hurt. On the other hand, we wanted to change the name after we found that Gomix sounded very much like a hurtful word in Russian (you can ask any Russian person: “What does ‘Gomix’ sound like in Russian?”). It was a tough decision, but we deem that it will pay off in the long run.
We tried to make the transition as transparent as possible. All links from gomix.com to glitch.com should be redirected automatically.
Thanks for pointing out broken links though I’ll make sure those are updated as well.
It’s definitely worth it in the long run! “Hyperdev” was a pretty cool name and (even not knowing the Russian slur till now) I wasn’t sure “Gomix” was an improvement. But getting glitch.com from the Slack folks is an opportunity you can’t pass up! And it’s adorably self-deprecating. And the Glitch folks said they won’t change the name again so all’s well that ends well!
PS: I actually wrote a kinda popular article years ago on naming things (“Nominology”) so now I’m curious how the 3 names fare…
The desiderata are:
EVOC – Evocativity – Conveys at least a hint of what it’s naming
BREV – Brevity – Shorter = better
GREP – Greppability – Not a substring of common words
GOOG – Googlability – Reasonably unique and/or domain name available
PRON – Pronounceability – You can read it out loud when you see it
SPEL – Spellability – You know how it’s spelled when you hear it
VERB – Verbability – The name (or variant thereof) can be used as a verb
I guess they all do pretty well by those criteria! I know “Hyperdev” was deemed too nerdy or not emphasizing the focus on non-developers, which makes sense. Glitch’s collision with the existing English word may be mildly inconvenient (like for web searches and news alerts, or just grepping when writing about Glitch) but worth it, especially having the “glitch.com” domain. “Gomix” was arguably the most verbable because it was already technically a complete sentence. But I don’t think I’d have ever actually verbed it that way. I can totally see myself talking about glitching something up. (:
I don’t think name changes are harmful. I don’t think naming is that important. I think people overvalue the process and underestimate how easy it is to change it later. I liked hyperdev but I think that Glitch is a solid name. hey, I liked the name Jade better than Pug. I don’t care though. Who cares. What you have today is the tinyest little seed of what you’ll have in 24 months (or what will be defunct and killed in 12 lol) so who cares what the names once were. Now the JadePug people won’t get sued and now the gomix/glitch people won’t offend anybody unintentionally.
I have really really loved and benefited from watching what I think of as fogcreek (rightly or wrongly) create a new product and group, and have learned a lot about how to do some minimum viable type testing without offending the users; I spend kind of a lot of time on this platform (A TON relative to what I’ve actually built, since I’m a beginner), and it feels like I was actively working DURING both changes, where my projects suddenly did a funky thing like “umm you mean gomix” or whatever and then “umm you mean glitch?” and both times I was really pleased to see how smoothly it worked. It’s been really enlightening to watch and experience.
Is it possible to keep the gomix domain from redirecting to glitch.com?
I would like to use glitch.com in schools, but currently the domain itself is blocked,
Websense has now re-categorized Glitch and say “updates should be reflected in the next scheduled database publication, and will be available shortly to Real-Time Updates subscribers”. So depending on how the DoE get their updates, it getting unblocked should be coming down the pipe.