OpenGeofiction
Recently it hit me- how come do we not have any (relevant) fictional web pages in OGF yet? Well, I spent the past few days brainstorming intensively and here are some ideas I came up with.
A search engine
There are plenty of them in the real world, but I think we’ll be fine with just one for now. As a test of pronounceability, I always try to use them in the sentence “If you don’t know, just ___ it!”
- Lokker - playing around with “look up”
- Ding - obvious Bing reference. don’t like this one very much because “ding it” sounds like a substitute swear word (like saying “dang it” instead of “damn it”)
- Najdu.db (pronounced “nye-do”) - an all-Drabantian search engine, in translation “I will find.db”
A video site
Look, the office workers in your countries just need to have a website to go to, procrastinating watching endless cat fail compilations.
- Playday - well the videos are so good, you’ll want to watch them all day
Social networks
Before you go like “ugh who even uses facebook in 2016 anymore,” remember there are soccer moms and lorry drivers in the OGF world too.
- Friender - a facebook-ish thing
- Beeper? Chirper (haa who else hated that b** bird in Cities:Skylines)? - a twitter-ish thing
- Snapdat! - yeah this one is not very original, but its teenage users are here for the dog filter and not the name, duhh
- Blurda - “blurter,” a place for anyone to blurt out their feelings and opinions in (real-life tumblr)
And also the most needed:
- Tender. Timber. Tinner. - just whatever
Other
- Pokemon Go. I am not a player or a Pokemon fan so I just have no idea
- Memes.
Write your ideas and suggestions!
Discussion
Comment from trabantemnaksiezyc on 17 August 2016 at 21:52
You forgot about the best site on the internet - SoundCloud. We also need MySpace and ThePirateBay* - maybe MusicRain, ArtPlace and PirateIsland (which btw. may be hosted in Antharia, because copyright laws don’t apply to software here :D ). Reddit - i have no idea, but we have our only-Antharian substitute: Przekop :D
*no, i don’t use it. It’s illegal. Unluckily.
Comment from Luciano on 17 August 2016 at 22:07
fifu.fa!
Comment from Leowezy on 17 August 2016 at 22:20
I really like most of the name suggestions you put forward, especially Lokker, playday, friender and Tender. I’m sure we can implement many of them into the OGF universe. One question that I think we must answer beforehand however is, from what country did these social medias come from? In our real world, “western” social media for the very most part stems from the US; we don’t have a direct equivalent for that, nor do we really have a well defined “western” world in OGF (there are the “European countries” in central Uletha and their former colonies all over the globe, however I don’t think we can directly translate that to these countries being that close culturally and geopolitically on the world stage as the RW western countries are).
On the other hand, in many other cultural spheres their own social media platforms are much more commonly used, and if we get to places like RW China then we can probably expect some places in OGF as well to outlaw some of these more “global” social media networks to favour more national ones.
These are my additional thoughts; regarding your suggestions, again I think that for an Ingerish speaking country of origin all of them could be feasible options :)
Comment from oscar2002 on 17 August 2016 at 22:34
Lokker me parece un estupendo nombre para un buscador, pero creo que hay que crear las redes sociales en OGF con nombres basados en el concepto de las mismas y no en el nombre de la que se basa en la realidad.
Friender y Tinner también me parecen buenos nombres ¿y quizá podría Tinner ser una empresa de Friender?
Creo que falta una red social tipo Instagram o Flirck, (Photostant o Photstant, del inglés photo e instant o Photogram, esta última es bastante poco original, pero allá va) destinstanada a compartir fotos y una aplicación de mensajería instantánea como la archiconocida WhatsApp, Line o Telegram, pero propongo que se acerque más a Skype (por ejemplo Talkys, de talk y sky; Messky, de message y sky o Messtant, inspirado en Photostant). Tampoco podemos olvidar una página de música en streaming tipo Spotify (no se me ocurre ningún nombre la verdad).
Para Snapchat quizás Mohours o Moours, (de moment y hours) Littime o Litime (de little time)
Playday me gusta bastante como nombre para el “sustituto” de YouTube en OGF, aunque me recuerda al Play de Google o a PayPal (no se por porque, será la costumbre).
Para Tumblr, y Twitter no se me ocurre nada, solo algo que no acabe en en -er, porque si no se van a parecer demasiado entre todas las redes sociales.
Oscar
Comment from Yuanls on 18 August 2016 at 03:36
I’ve thought about this before but never had a chance to say anything about this. What Leowezy says is true: we don’t have any modern superpowers. Most large, global tech companies are partially or wholly based in the USA, which is a way for the nation to project its ‘soft power’ over the world.
Whether there are any really large companies like Google/Alphabet, which own various tech related and social networking brands is up for discussion. The lack of 1 established OGF superpower might make the internet a more competitive and less coordinated place as there is no hotspot for ideas and inventions to start developing and expanding. On the other hand, the abundance of Ingerish-speakers in OGF means the connection and development of the internet slightly quicker. There’s also the question: who in what country made the internet?
Comment from eklas on 18 August 2016 at 07:15
I think we could create a american-style superpower on one of these excessively large grey areas (UL099, AR120), but it would have to be a collaborative project and would require a great amount of effort and time, so it might just never happen.
It is also true that OGF countries are distributed randomly across the world. We know that Uletha is supposed to be european-like, but then again what is the rest of the continents like? Each of them has the same mixture of HDI 0.9 countries, “highways ftw” countries, “active” countries with literally nothing mapped, (…)
But I don’t think we need a global superpower as a country of origin for these. The “melting pot of technology” could be placed in any country of at least continental significance/relevance using Ingerish or a related language. Like:
But obviously, that would require approval from the respective owners of these.
By the way, “Messtant” is a great name for an instant messenger. It (almost) means “Expo-aunt” in gaerman, but yeah we can get over that.
Comment from kingfries on 18 August 2016 at 10:23
Really love these names lol. Pokemon Go could be uuuhm… ,MonsterHunter’ ? ,CatchEm!’ , btw: is there a Japanese style country? Because that would be where it’ll come from obviously. What else do we need? Twitch? Could be ,LiveGame’? ,Instastream’? or what about 9GAG? or Netflix? Watch N Chill? (if you know what I…nevermind hehe) Couch-Odeon? What did I forget uhm…. Maybe everyone just goes through the pages that they use daily and try to find a name if no one else has already. I, as example, use only Youtube, Wikipedia, Twitter,Google and 9Gag daily ,well and OGF obviously. Oh and thanks eklas for bringing this up.
Comment from niels20020 on 19 August 2016 at 10:00
@kingfries Meilan is a Japenese-like country I think.
Comment from Leowezy on 19 August 2016 at 11:01
@niels20020 I’m not sure if you are after language or culture, but from my very superficial first impression I would group Meilan rather with China than with Japan. But I don’t think we would need a “Japan”-Counterpart to be the origin of this segment of pop culture :)
Comment from eklas on 19 August 2016 at 12:38
Meilan is even using chinese characters…
But Leowezy has a good point. The world’s innovation incubator (or whatever you’d like to call it) could be in literally any developed country or countries. We just need to decide which one/s (see my comment above).
Comment from niels20020 on 19 August 2016 at 17:02
Oh, I’m sorry, Meilan is indeed a Chinese-like country :p
Comment from mstr on 19 August 2016 at 18:43
So far Mergany could provide *Electronic Buy – founded 1995 – e-commerce company like eBay, *Sabouche – from french “s’aboucher avec qn.” and , founded 2003 – a social network like facebook which are opened to several languages. I prefer several nations with important web pages instead of one superpower.
Comment from niels20020 on 19 August 2016 at 21:33
I prefer the idea of mstr too; several nations with important web pages.
Comment from Ernestpkirby on 20 August 2016 at 02:10
Freedemia has been using a social media site called Tweetbook in news articles and such considering the lack of universal substitute but I never got around to making the wiki page for it
Comment from Ernestpkirby on 20 August 2016 at 02:13
(the idea of Tweetbook as the name implies was a Twitter clone with no character limit and more Facebook-like posts)
Comment from eklas on 20 August 2016 at 08:00
I think the networks and pages should be split between 4 - 7 main “technology hub” countries. Drabantia is taking najdu.db (duh), but you’re free to claim the rest.
Also, let’s decide for the names. Let alone Tweetbook, Sabouche etc., so far we have:
Reply with your favorite names.
Comment from Leowezy on 21 August 2016 at 10:28
I don’t think we need to “decide”; users can just make wiki articles about social media invented in their countries, and then everyone can describe if and how heavily that network is used in everyone’s country either on that same page or just mention it in their own articles.
Comment from isleño on 23 August 2016 at 16:32
I agree that there’s not really a need to decide immediately where these websites originated. I think it’s fine if they originate in random areas, and it’s also fine for rival websites to emerge and serve different sets of countries.
On the issue of UL099 and AR120: the reason these are “reserved” is for the possibility that the community can collaboratively create some “superpower” countries in the future. A lot of work, yes, but I think some big countries will definitely help our world feel more realistic.
Comment from adminero_us on 25 August 2016 at 15:46
Look at my project… i think we an actually brink these websites to life.