This article was published on June 13, 2009

Friendly Reminder: Make sure you grab your Facebook Vanity URL today.


Friendly Reminder: Make sure you grab your Facebook Vanity URL today.

nameAs you might already know Facebook today started rolling out Vanity URLs. What this means is that instead of handing out a lengthy, non-speaking URL including your Profile ID, you can now secure yourself your very own, unique http://www.facebook.com/[yourname] address.

According to Mashable within the first three minutes 200.000 users registered. 15 minutes later, half a million unique names where grabbed.

To secure yours, simply visit http://www.facebook.com/username.

Facebook has taken some proactive counter-measures to avoid the blocking of hundreds of popular names by single users, as we’ve experienced it with domain names. Your unique username needs to be at minimum five characters long. You’ve got to be a Facebook member for a while. Freshly registered users can’t claim a name today.

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Running a Facebook Page with more than 1000 fans? You can go ahead and secure a Vanity URL for that one, too.

When choosing your address be careful. Once set, it’s read-only. You cannot change it. You cannot delete it.

Forget about putting a dot in your name

And by the way: The system ignores a dot (or even multiple dots) in your username. As an example, I’ve registered “ralfrottmann”, however, this one works, too: http://www.facebook.com/ralf.rottmann and even this one: http://www.facebook.com/ra.l.f.rott.mann. So don’t worry about getting a dotted name!

Let us know your Vanity URLs or awesome ones, you’ve stumbled upon.

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