» Facebook vanity URLs – Did you get yours?

Jun

2009

Facebook vanity URLs – Did you get yours?

by Jeremy

The launch of Facebook vanity URLs has had the social media industry alive with buzz. Find out what all the fuss is about.

For those who don’t know, Facebook has given users the opportunity to register a “vanity URL”. Up until now there’s been no easy way to share your Facebook page with anyone. With vanity URLs, once you have registered, people can find you by going to www.facebook.com/YourUsername. Fear not, your privacy settings will remain the same, so for those who are a little concerned with protecting their identities, you’re OK!

The idea is that it makes your Facebook profile shareable with other people. This means you can start sending it to all your friends, posting it on twitter and so on. It will also make your Facebook profile indexable by the search engines. Not that they haven’t been before, but it will mean that your profile will be more likely to rank highly for your username.

Companies/famous people etc. with over 1,000 fans will be able to register their user names, something that is more significant than Joe Bloggs being able to register www.facebook.com/joebloggs. This has given rise to the rather unfortunate phrase “face squatting”. A term that was bounded around twitter a lot yesterday in an attempt to get CNN to use the phrase in their news reports. Not sure if that was successful!

I digress, so with the fear that brands will not be able to register their trademark names, Facebook set up a “pre-register”. It did state that this was no guarantee and that no response would be given to your pre-registering. It clearly shows that Facebook are preparing themselves for some legal battles much like Google had when they removed trademark bidding in the UK. We’ll have to wait and see what happens there!

This post was written by Jeremy Jacobs, owner of The Digital Consultant