Microsoft recently unveiled Surface, a tabletop computer with an amazing multi-touch interface. There’s no keyboard or mouse–you interact with Surface through its display, which is touch-sensitive and can respond to simultaneous touches from multiple fingers or people. That means you can “grab” objects and move them around, re-size photos by stretching them out with your fingers, and do other things that seem kind of like magic.

These multi-touch interfaces are really exciting. Jeff Han, a consulting research scientist in NYU’s Department of Computer Science, gave a jaw-dropping demo of his multi-touch technology that The Name Inspector caught at ETech 2006. Here’s a video for a similar demo at TED 2006. Judging from the videos on Microsoft’s website, Surface is a simpler, consumer-oriented implementation of the same idea, with the added capability of interacting with devices, like cellphones and digital music players, that are placed on top of it.

The name Surface is about as generic as you can get without actually naming a product category. The other Microsoft brand name that it most resembles is Word. Each of these names is based on a noun that literally refers to something associated with the product in question–both names use metonymy. However, while Word is a relatively concrete reference to an aspect of language (about as concrete as you can get where language is concerned), Surface has a very abstract, schematic meaning.

The word surface is an intrinsically relational noun–we seldom talk about a surface unless we specify what it is a surface of (a planet, the cerebral cortex, etc.). One of the interesting things about the name Surface is that it takes this relational meaning and makes it stand on its own–now we can talk about owning a Surface, without specifying what it is the surface of. Because the name is a reification of an abstract spatial concept, it suggests the gray area between the real and the virtual. This is perfect for the product, which allows people to interact with virtual objects on the screen as if they were physically present: touching them, moving them, spreading them out, etc.

Of course, it would be a mistake to link this technology directly to the idea of a tabletop computer. Microsoft envisions a future of surface computing in which the technology will be found on lots of things besides tabletops–including even “the hallway mirror”. So this name is an attempt to define a new category and to own it.

The word surface has a some other positive features. It contains the word surf, making a pretty explicit connection to the web (something Microsoft has been especially interested in doing lately). It also has appropriate sound symbolism for a multi-touch interface. All its consonants are voiceless fricatives, which have a hissing sound that suggests movement with light friction.

The word surface is not an unalloyed asset, however. Its big downside is its conventional metaphorical connection to the ideas of superficiality and potentially deceptive appearances. When we scratch the surface of a topic, we investigate or discuss it in the sketchiest of terms, without engaging with most of what there is to know about it. When we say that something seems one way on the surface, there’s a strong implication that it’s different deep inside.

Metaphorically speaking, however, a system’s user interface is its surface. The suitability of the word in this context trumps the possible negative associations. The Name Inspector would be happy to delve into the world of surface computing, and can’t wait until Surface–or some other competing product–is available at a consumer-friendly price.

Tags: surface, the name surface, microsoft surface, the name microsoft surface, microsoft word, multi-touch, touch-sensitive, tabletop computer

PageFlakes shows how a quirky but vivid metaphor can make for a good name. In this case the name is for a customizable Ajax personal home page similar to Netvibes.

The quirky, one is almost tempted to say flaky, thing about this name is of course the word flakes. Flakes are insubstantial little things and not necessarily so desirable. Think of dandruff, or paint coming off your wall.

But these possible negative associations don’t matter so much, because it’s apparent that the flake metaphor is evoked in this context not for its emotional appeal, but for its cognitive utility. It gives people a tangible way to understand what the service is and does. Each little draggable box on your Ajax start page is like a miniature page–a flake of a page–that can be moved around.

There’s something interesting to notice here. PageFlakes is a vivid name, and that’s good, but it’s vivid in a particular way. There are different ways for a name to be vivid. Sometimes a name introduces sensory associations in all their minute detail to bathe something in a warm emotional glow, the way Apple does. Other times a name provides a sort of cognitive scaffolding to help people understand what something is all about. In that case the most important sensory associations are schematic ones relating to general size, shape, motion, and other properties that allow us to make inferences about how we might physically interact with something.

So it is with PageFlakes. Flakes are tiny, flat, highly mobile, and cling to things. These associations give us a strong sense of what we’ll be doing when we use PageFlakes, and make the name much more interesting than the name of the competing home page service Netvibes, which doesn’t really give us any inferential meat to sink our teeth into.

All this is not to say that PageFlakes is devoid of emotional appeal. It has a fun association with breakfast cereals like Corn Flakes and Frosted Flakes. Think of something convenient and delicious that you sit down in front of first thing in the morning, and you’ll get the picture.

Phonetically, PageFlakes gets a bit of poetry from the assonance (repeated vowel sounds) and the similarity of the [p] and [f] sounds. The transition between consonants in the middle of the name is a little inelegant, but nothing to lose sleep over.

PageFlakes isn’t a perfect name, but it really gets its apt little metaphor stuck in your mind, and it works.

Tags: PageFlakes, the name PageFlakes, Netvibes, flakes, Ajax, start page, home page, personalization