Facebook vanity URLs available June 13

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Matthew DeCarlo

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Facebook has decided to offer its users an additional level of profile customization. Starting June 13 at 4:01am GMT the popular social networking site will allow users to secure a custom username for their profiles. The handles will replace the present random sequence of digits in the URL.

Names will be restricted to alphanumeric characters and a period, and must be a minimum of five characters long. To lockdown your preferred name on Saturday, head over to facebook.com/username. Obviously no two handles will be identical, and with a userbase of 200 million plus – the early bird will most certainly get the worm. Fan Pages will require at least 1,000 fans and must have been created prior to May 31 of this year in order to qualify for a custom name.

Just like other social networking sites, once a profile URL has been chosen, it is set in stone. That said, in case you’re undecided or genuinely uninterested, selecting a name isn’t mandatory. The company hopes to make it easier for friends, family and even search engines to find profiles. How many of you will be spamming page refreshes at 4am to snag the common first names? I hope not too many.

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Welcome to MySpace 2.5. Though I do use Facebook on a daily basis to taunt people with my political views, I never had an interest in this. I could care less about using a custom username. The lack of a username is something that actually set it apart from all the other crappy social networking sites.

I also don't see how using a username is going to make it any easier for your friends/family to find you, unless you tell them specifically what your username is. How many of you are getting friend requests from people you used to go to school with, but haven't seen in years? Yeah, they're not going to know your username. Pointless "feature" if you ask me, but hey, if you want to use it... use it.
 
Its so you can say "check my profile out at www.facebook.com/cool"

personally cant be arsed tho.
 
I get why they do it... but this isn't exactly a new technology nor a big improvement. People and companies have been using virtual hosts/sub-domains/etc for nearly 2 decades. They should have done this from the beginning. I kind of enjoyed the fact that they didn't jump on the bandwagon.

Maybe I'm just too old to enjoy social networking sites anymore. ;/ Grumpy old man.
 
Like you said, it's not necessary, so that's undoubtedly why they didn't do it since the beginning.

Facebook seems to understand a little better than other sites that these things are pretty much trends and don't necessarily last. There's only so much they can do to keep generating interest, so they appear to be holding onto a lot of their cards, rather than playing them all at once, so to speak.
 
Thanks for the info!
I got my name as the username.
You don't need 1,000 Fans to get your own username.
Your Facebook account must be registered before June 9 as the only criteria.
 
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