Those of you who follow Social Media news might be very well aware: From today onwards you can register your Facebook Vanity URL.
What does this mean?
It’s simple: For years to direct your friends to your Facebook profile you had to hand them a lengthy, non-speaking URL including your Profile ID. Most of the other popular social network services were already using speaking addresses. For example my FriendFeed is located at http://www.friendfeed.com/ralfrottmann.
Facebook Vanity URLs allow you to register a unique username for your profile. Mine is http://www.facebook.com/ralfrottmann. To claim yours now, just visit http://www.facebook.com/username.
Facebook has proactively taken some counter-measures to avoid the land-grabbing we all have seen with domain names (and nowadays Twitter names, too). Your Vanity URL name has to be at least five characters long. You have to be a Facebook member for a while. Newly registered Facebook accounts have to wait. In case you want to register a Vanity URL for a Page, that page needs to have at minimum 1000 fans.
Setting a username is a one-time only activity. You cannot change it. You cannot delete it. So be careful as your Facebook Vanity URL literally becomes a lifetime companion.
