Is Microsoft's "Thinga.Me" the Worst Named App Ever?
The app digitizes your physical collections.
Microsoft is doing a lot of cool things lately. The company is starting to perfect the whole laptop/tablet two-in-one combo thing and it has an incredibly interesting augmented reality headset called Hololens, which lets users play Minecraft on a coffee table. However, the company’s latest app seems, if not incredibly pointless, certainly poorly named.
In fact, it could have one of the worst names in mobile app history, at least from a major company release. It’s called Thinga.Me (pronounced without the “dot”) and it scans the physical objects in your life and creates a shelf to digitally display cutouts of the objects, which are automatically generated from the photo and turned into a pseudo 3D object.
Thinga.Me was produced by Microsoft’s experimental projects lab called The Garage, which has actually produced some cool things in the past such as a smartphone keyboard that makes it easier to type with one hand. Thinga.Me could be a fine app as well, it’s just held back by this atrocious name.
Thinga.Me Scans Objects to place on a digital shelf.
One could imagine using these digital shelves for a number of things: keeping a catalog of a child’s many precious and at times not so beautiful arts and crafts, a record of those concert tickets piling up in a drawer, or a way to show off your extensive action figure collection to someone at the bar.
“As a team, we’ve been frustrated that there aren’t decent tools that allow us to digitize these physical things in a way that makes them look great, and allows us to organize them and, if we want, share them with others,” The Garage team explained in a blog post. “Thinga.Me is designed to fill this gap.”
Alas, Microsoft had to call it Thinga.Me. Its name is also the opposite of what it does. You’re not creating things — if anything you’re allowing yourself to destroy physical things and replace them with digital avatars.
Even if Thinga.Me isn’t the most poorly named app, it has be in the top five somewhere next to Touch Teen Patti, Funny Hand Dryer, Floating Miley Cyrus, and (controversial statement ahead) Meerkat.
