Do you like stories about the origin of something? I clearly remember how Zuckerberg’s social network could have been known as The Facebook, now that would have been pretty sad in this day and age considering how everyone else is so used to just plain old Facebook, right? Well, it has just been revealed that Skype, the VoIP messaging system that we have all come to know and love, could have taken a slight deviation in its naming convention earlier. Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström claimed that while he was developing the app in Estonia, the first name that the group came up with was, wait for it, Skyper.
Zennström said, “The original name had an ‘r’at the end, which came from peer-to-peer in the Sky.” It seemed that registering Skyper as a domain name proved to be an issue, so they purchased the rights to Skyper.net instead. As Skyper inched closer to its launch date of August 29, 2003, they decided to drop the .net in the domain name, which was why they did away with the ‘r’ and Skype was born officially, alongside the Skype.com domain name. Another example of all’s well that ends well, no? Do you think that Skyper would have affected the eventual success of Skype that we all know today?
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