Filed under: Multimedia, Software, Video, Internet, Open Source
Democracy Player changes name to 'Miro'
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 open source internet television surfing program, despite sticking with the original name for over a year. "Our early Mac beta versions of Democracy Player were called 'DTV'– we didn't think that we could be 'Democracy' until we had something substantial to offer... 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."
With that, the new name will be Miro, and a there's a lesson to be learned here in the meantime: if you've got a potentially creative, but ultimately too symbolic 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. Anyway, check out the official word from the folks themselves to get the full lowdown.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Joshua Ochs said 6:09PM on 3-12-2007
It worked - this is the first time I'm been interested in it, since up until now I assumed it was some oddball niche program.
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Joshua Ochs said 6:10PM on 3-12-2007
Of course, the web site doesn't seem to work yet - hmmm...
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Neven said 6:52PM on 3-12-2007
Wow. The name Democracy was the only thing I thought didn't absolutely suck about the program.
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Nick Shulman said 7:05PM on 3-12-2007
Miro is the name of the delinquent boy in the new movie Breaking and Entering.
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Nick said 7:06PM on 3-12-2007
Coincidence?
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Dan said 10:35PM on 3-12-2007
So I have to log in AND confirm? Gracious!
Anyway, "miro" means, "I watch" in Spanish and benefits from the similarity to the word "mirror" which has visual connotations. (That similarity, of course, is not a coincidence)
The problem for me on Democracy Player, er.. Miro, is there's never anything I want to watch. I'm sure that will come in time.
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Marco said 3:00AM on 3-13-2007
well.... Miro is already used by Pinnacle systems for their video cards... so I wonder if this is a smart move using an already registered name.
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Paul said 10:34AM on 3-13-2007
Err, funny, in French (maybe slang) it means a person whose vision is extremely low.
Not really great for a television service.
Maybe they don't consider the French market as sufficiently substantial.
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