As new technologies and services progess they become a vital piece of mainstream society. Inevitably, people start to use them as verbs, with “Google” being the most common. I was sitting around the other day thinking about this and decided to create a small list, hopefully that you can add on to in the comments. Enjoy!
Digg: verb: to digg, past: dugg, present: digging
Digg is the social bookmarking phenomenon site/portal that really kicked off the current web trend of using the latest services (most qualifying as Web 2.0), as verbs. Digg has become so popular that people have begun misspelling the regular word dig when they want to use it in that context. You often hear people saying things like “hey man, can you digg this link for me”, “dude, I got dugg today!” or “nice article paul, I digg it.”
Facebook: verb: to facebook, past: facebooked, present: facebooking
More common among college students, facebook is an online directory of people who choose to put up a brief bio about themselves and “facebook” their friends. This allows others to see how popular one is or the type of people they hang out with as well as what activities they enjoy. It is similar to MySpace but was originally meant for college campuses only, although it has recently expanded to include high schools and companies. The most common use of this new verb means the action of friending or searching for someone on the facebook network. An example phrase might be “I don’t know her last name, so I’ll just facebook it” or “for some reason you haven’t yet facebooked me.”
Flickr: verb: to flickr or to flickrize, past: flickred, present: flickring
It’s hard to come across a person somewhat involved with technology and the internet that has not heard of Flickr, the ultimate photo-sharing website and community. With its rapid growth over the past few years, it’s no wonder why people have started using the name of this amazing service as a verb. In common usage, flickering something refers to either the act of searching for photos on flickr or uploading one’s own photos to the website. For example, “nah Joe, I missed the event, but I’ll flickr the pics to see what I missed out on.” Another example is as follows: “I’m going to flickr my vacation pictures right now, refresh my flickr page in a few minutes.”
Blog: verb: to blog, past: blogged, present: blogging
Stemming from the hybrid word weblog, a combination of web and log, blog is the oh-so-popular slang version of a word originally relating to an online diary of sorts. Since that time the definition of a blog has only broadened. The use of blog as a verb implies the act of working on or writing an entry for an online website with reverse-chronologically ordered and dated posts, in the traditional weblog format. Common uses are as follows: “I need to blog about that new HD-DVD burner” or “John got sued for blogging about something that was under an NDA.”
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Nice article!
myspace, myspaced, myspacing
to use myspace, in all its craptivity
Nice article Paul, perhaps you should also define some internet slang while you are at it. Or maybe I should?
Haha, go for it gomes.
Here in the UK the mass market use Bebo.com, it’s terrible. I hear people on the bus talking about putting things on their bebo and I want to slap them and tell them how shit it is and they should use Flickr instead. Then again, most of the social network crowd use IE so they are beyond help.
Ping: To send an instant-message. This one annoys me because I see it as a total misuse of the word, but people still use it.
Tag: Ugh, I liked it better when this was about grafiti.
Ah, yes Ping! I use that one myself.
Flickr is also the verb that leads to Flickr finger. That is the disese where a person has their finger constantly ready to catch you doing something stupid so they can post it on Flickr.
From the “blog” definition: “for an online website with chronologically ordered and dated posts”
Shouldn’t that be “reverse-chronologically”? I don’t know if the phrase is correct as I typed it, but reverse is key and should be in there somewhere.
Also: seconding “ping”.
Interesting article. A friend and I were having a similar discussion about this.
Here’s one I’ve been hearing lately, “I’ll send you an Evite to my wedding.” *cringe*
I use “ping” with reference to IMs, but only really to “are you there” type messages. Seems like a fitting use to me.
Paul,
I like how you broke this down and gave us these examples. I think that there are still plenty of new technologies and services have a really strong ability to become “verbs”, or as I call it “Normal”. One idea is ClaimID. I’m not sure what the verb will be but I’d be curious to see.
to IMDB something, or wikipedia something to search the aforementioned databases ©The Troll
Great article, Paul.
I use so many tech terms as verbs, people think I’m a freak.
Define the business act of keeping a an active and current diary, for example, his diary was not current, it was not “diaried” to date? There seems to be no verb use of diary. If the file is not “diaried”, the reviewer cannot succinctly comment on why the file is not compliant. any ideas?