The Twitter Effect

What’s in a name? If it happens to be Twitter, the answer is roughly $1.1 billion.

In just four years, Twitter has gone from birdsong to the most used word in the English language, according to Global Language Monitor data for 2009. (“Obama” was a close second.)

Twitter spokesman Matt Graves explains that his company’s insipidly brilliant name was “the result of a brainstorm between a small group of employees at Odeo, the San Francisco podcasting startup where Twitter initially began as a side project. They came up with possible names, including ‘Jitter’ and ‘Twitter,’ and put them in a hat,” Graves says. Twitter won.

Now the race is on to coin the next weirdly memorable company name, says BusinessWeek. Birds of a feather flock together.