The initial Facebook URL landgrab to get a vanity name against your profile.

If you are into Social Media and the Internet — the Facebook.com/Vanity-URL experience is — or speaking in past-tense was — a must for you. On the 13th June 2009 at approximately 2PM Melbourne, Australia (GMT+10) — Facebook opened their service to include Vanity Urls — that is, instead of the old “facebook.com/profile.php?id=123456789” — you could now have “facebook.com/YourName”. If you still haven’t done this, you need to goto www.facebook.com/username/.

The response was unbelievable — more than 500,000 names were registered within the first 10 minutes. Lucky for me, I was able to secure the exact name I wanted — which makes things much easier now to tell everyone where to find me on Facebook. Unfortunately, for the millions of users who did not login when the process began — most, if not all, of the common English name associations would be taken inferring — much like emails — that you will have to have a combination of letters and numbers and wont be able to secure the name you want.

Facebook Username

My name is common with more more than 1000 other people around the world — so having to be quick off the mark was pretty essential. Luckily — the exact name I wanted was not one of the “suggested” names or combinations — so I had to select more “Choose your Own Name”. My trick was that I had previously setup “Copy/Paste” for my name, so I was able to quickly hit Ctrl+V on this field and then select the “Set Username” — meaning that I was luckily enough to get in immediately — while more than likely, another Tim Davis around the world was typing the exact name. I was in all likelihood — only milliseconds ahead.

Now you may be reading this post thinking “you are such a nerd” — but for me — having an easy-to-remember facebook URL makes life so much simplier. I can tell friends, family, colleagues and business associates where they can find me on Facebook without forcing them to remember combinations of letters and numbers — which often get lost, can’t be remembered and could result in lost opportunities. Considering that once a name is set — it can never be changed — I don’t necessarily think it was such a bad thing to be online for and secure a little piece of Facebook real-estate.

If you secured the name you wanted, drop a note in the comments :)