Find me a "ster"

Yesterday, while browsing a Jewish cultural site, SC noticed an ad for a website called "Frumster" ("frum" is a Yiddish word meaning a very religious person). The site bills itself as "the dating service exclusively for Orthodox Jewish singles worldwide" (emphasis in original).

The name Frumster is just one more in a series of "-ster"s beginning with the original, Napster. There are plenty of others, including Grokster and Friendster. Thanks to Napster and those who have followed in its path, "-ster" looks like it's become a cranberry morpheme with a meaning along the lines of "thing for finding something, possibly (but not necessarily) what it's attached to". It's not always compositional -- Napster doesn't help you find a place to nap, and Grokster doesn't help you grok anything, but Friendster definitely is intended to help you find friends. As further evidence that people use it productively, SC was able to find coinages of "carster" and even "warezster" (perhaps surprisingly, no such site actually exists, although it would be the target of massive lawsuits if it did).

Of course, since Napster's momentum was stopped cold, "-ster" may not have much life left in it. Most of the coinages above are from 2000 or 2001; new "-sters", particularly successful ones, are hard to come by. Maybe the next big one is really going to be "-gle", with a meaning not unlike the one "-ster" was working on acquiring. Google has already introduced "Froogle", and H.P. Lovecraft fans will be delighted to learn about "Cthuugle" (which SC is grateful to Uncle Jazzbeau for coming across; he didn't mention it, but they've got a great error message for searches that come up empty). Your host failed to successfully guess any other words that "-gle" had been tacked onto to describe a search engine for something, so perhaps it won't really catch on.

Proclaiming something to be a cranberry morpheme probably requires it to have a bit more stability within common vocabulary than just being "meme-of-the-moment". "-ula" is productive in part because Dracula is well-known and has been for a long time. And "cran-" has had millions in marketing dollars behind it for many years. Maybe the closest thing that the computer science field has to a cranberry morpheme with this kind of stability and popularity is "-soft", whose owner I won't bother linking to (since they decided not too long ago that they didn't want a follow-up interview with SC; perhaps they know that he was about the last person to give up on OS/2 at home).

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