Geeks Celebrate New Year’s Rocking Eve Style As URL Land Grab Comes Timed Just Right By Facebook
By Lon S. Cohen
True geeks were up to count down the seconds until Facebook opened up its newest feature on Friday night. The ability to grab a vanity URL for your Facebook profile became available at midnight on Friday, June 12th. Curiously, Facebook never instituted the standard of allowing users to sign up with a unique URL of their choosing. I can only speculate that when the service started as a way for university students to keep in touch with each other and share photos and status updates, that the user base was small enough that this was not a factor thought to be programmed into the original application. Now with hundreds of millions of users across the globe and with other Social Networking services long offering the ability to customize the URL for your account, Facebook decided it was time to play catch up and pack on this particular feature. Where before the link to my Facebook profile was an obscure computer generated string of characters, On Friday night I was able to snag my name as my profile web address: www.facebook.com/loncohen.
There was excitement in the air around the geek community as customized URLs allow for people to quickly share profiles in a logical way and gives the service cache once reserved for websites like Twitter. On Twitter I share my handle by telling people to look me up as @obilon. Most people are conditioned to recognize the @ symbol from email. Twitter users adopted the feature of using the @ symbol to alert another user that they were speaking to them or replying to something they Tweeted. As Twitter gained in popularity, the @ symbol became the de facto way to refer someone specifically to your twitter account leaving off the extraneous www.twitter.com/
Now that Facebook has made it possible for users to grab unique user names, the service can share the same cool kind of shorthand. When you tell someone to friend you on Facebook you only need to tell them you’re /loncohen or whatever your unique handle happens to be instead of sending them a request specifically or a complicated url (which no one ever bothers to remember.)
It also will make Facebook profiles easier to share on paper. Printing it out on a business card or advertisement like so:
Twitter: @obilon
Facebook: /loncohen
As I mentioned before, we’ve been conditioned to remember and share specific user generated handles on the internet from email addresses to AIM profile names. This comes on the heels of Facebook offering businesses and celebrities the option of moving their very limited Facebook Group pages to more versatile Facebook Fan pages that act more like regular profile pages. Fan pages with more than 1000 friends were also offered the opportunity to select a unique URL. This is a strategically shrewd business move for Facebook still struggling to monetize an enormous user base. I can only imagine the possibilities that customized URLs will offer large businesses like say Starbuck when they can now put in print that you can friend them on Facebook at /Starbucks. It’s harder to refuse the Facebook advertising salespeople when come calling about custom marketing programs when your company has millions of friends on their Social Networking website.
While some specific people’s custom urls were pre-reserved by Facebook, I don’t know yet if they also captured many brand name URLs for the specific purpose of offering them (or selling them) to the brand owners – think /Apple or /Microsoft, although a rumor on Twitter last night claimed valuable custom URLs like /iPod were still available.
The entire process seemed to have gone smooth for Facebook. Mashable.com reported on their Mashable.com/chat live from Facebook headquarters in an exclusive by Ben Parr that within the first three minutes of launch 200,000 user names had been reserved and that within t
he first hour they tallied about 1,000,000! So while the true geeks waited with baited breath for the precise moment, about 400 uber-geeks (myself proudly included) were crowded around the live Mashable chat with video commentary by Mr. Mashable himself the always charming and way too young and handsome, Pete Cashmore playing Dick Clark along with the always lovely Jennifer Van Grove and straight-man utility-player Ben Parr reporting from an empty room at Facebook HQ with 1970s furniture and the sounds of cheers, music, shouting and even some bagpipes (which Pete said was in honor of him, being from Scotland and all of course) emanating from an unseen room of engineers off somewhere behind the walls giving the entire scene with Ben an eerie feeling that he was somehow embedded inside the building and spying on the whole affair without permission through a hole in the wall. At other times Ben ran off to record video or audio and bringing back reports at Pete’s bequest looking like the set up in an old SNL skit. In any sense, the crew of Mashable put on a great show that spanned the globe from Scotland to California. They did it all in earnest, covering the entire event from the pre-show to the 10-second countdown all the way through the after party. I must admit the trio brought a very sparkling air to the event that probably made it more entertaining and exciting than it really should have been otherwise. Even Mashable COO Adam Hirsch popped into the chat for a little while, forlorn at the option he was forced to pick for his own vanity url. (My personal favorite Mashable.com liaison, Sharon Feder was missing from the videos but I heard she was in the chat room somewhere.)
The next day I heard very little in the way of buyer’s remorse at the URLs people chose. For the most part it seemed to be a rousing success. Only time will tell how this all pans out. For now it looks like it was a great move on Facebook’s part to offer this feature now especially after migrating Groups to Fan pages a short time ago. It also served as great buzz for the monster Social Networking website probably exceeding their expectations.