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We’re loving Twitter’s branding at Albion, for three reasons:

Firstly, it’s a great name. Less than 8 letters 8 letters or less (which @cdickens says is critical for any modern brand). It’s kind of onomatopoeic – it reflects the 140 character limit of the messages. It’s fun. It’s nice to say.

Secondly, they’ve been relaxed about letting their ecosystem use it, or variants of it. So it’s everywhere online.

Here’s a selection of the hundreds (thousands?) of apps that have sprung up using the Twitter API. It’s adapted from www.twitterapps.co.uk, but we’ve sorted them into categories according to how they’ve co-opted the ‘Twitter’ name:

It’s the third column that’s the really clever bit though.

Customers love to turn brand names into verbs. And you’d think that would be the ultimate accolade, when your service is so ubiquitous it enters common language. But that also means you lose control over your trademark as it is no longer ‘distinctive’. The list of words that started as brand names is long: Yo-Yo, Zipper and Heroin… That’s why Google issued instructions telling people not to use the verb ‘to google’. Of course people still will, but they have to be seen to play the game.

Through accident or design though, the verb that is most commonly used among Twitter users is ‘to tweet’. Not ‘to twitter’.

If they can encourage this action, persuading the ecosystem to use more ‘tweet’ derivatives and less ‘twitter’ derivatives, then perhaps they can have the best of both worlds: a strong protected brand name *and* an associated verb in common usage.

Unless a trademark lawyer can correct us…?