Facebook is getting wise to something MySpace has known from the start – users love vanity URLs. When you tell someone your MySpace page, you just say myspace.com/[user/brand/band/etc.] (I’m myspace.com/mikearrington). On Facebook it has always been more difficult.
My profile isn’t Facebook.com/michaelarrington, it’s facebook.com/profile.php?id=500065899. Not so catchy, and the result is people need to do searches to find you. MySpace vanity URLs are popular for the same reason people like domain names instead of just typing in IP addresses.
Facebook’s policy on this is clearly changing, at least for Pages (where bands, celebrities, brands, etc. have their Facebook presence). Facebook has always had a few vanity URLs associated with Pages, like Facebook.com/U2. They made it clear last August, though, that most people couldn’t get them:
Unfortunately we are not currently able to approve requests for vanity URLs. The only Pages that presently have vanity URLs are bands and businesses that partnered with us for the initial launch of this new product. We hope to make these URLs available for everyone to have on their individual Page(s) in the future. When this feature is available, we will provide instructions on how to obtain a vanity URL at http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=60. We apologize for any inconvenience in the mean time.
Now, though, Facebook seems to be letting more people have vanity URLs. Kevin Rose celebrated getting one earlier today, for example. Ashton Kutcher also has one, as does Demi Moore. The TechCrunch Page, alas, does not (hover over that link, whoa).
Wonder why it’s taking so long, as it’s so easy to do. Our site will give users vanity URLs from the start.
Jonathan
1-800-Pharmacy
These things are more than just pretty urls. They will also be the key to all the type of messaging people will be using on Facebook going forward and could eventually lead into @XXX type communication when facebook implements more sophisiticated micro-blogging. With a population close to 200M, there are going to be huge fights over these handles.
Wishing good luck to techcrunch for a decent url in facebook.. Nice place to apply for though
Vanity URLs are also good for FaceBook as more search engine traffic for a person or band or company’s name will get to them.
Totally agree with you Edwin. Heres a company thats made/making a business of a collection of vanity/premium urls on YouTube. Looks interesting. http://www.yout...rtubemanagement. Vanity urls look good on a business card and spell out exactly who you are without confusion.
Not to belittle your company, Jonathan, but you don’t have 175 million registered users. If FB has a complication in allowing vanity URLs, it’s a problem of scale.
oh the power of direct navigation. its truly priceless. compare a vanity phone number to a vanity domain and its a thousand to one. one day a company will offer a selection of over 1300 vertical email and subsite domain faceplates that are relevant to your product, service or presence. these “email and subsite domain faceplates” will cover the jim1999@hotmail address that pollute the cybersphere. jim is a professional and wants a name that it tailored to him. he chooses jim@professionallocator and professionallocator.com/jim. now when he speaks to a client they are instantly understanding of jims professionalism. yes ladies and gents its time for a internet makeover. its coming.
InLocator.com – cure the internet
Design decisions (including features like vanity URLs) are about much more than “can we do it technically?” or “can we scale it?” I’d imagine Facebook didn’t do them in the past simply because that wasn’t part of the vision for the product. Now it is.
Products that include things for no better reason than they can or that feature would be “easy” should seriously reconsider. Less is often more.
Well said.
what about http://www.tiny-fb.com? turns your facebook url into a vanity url to twitter, sms, email, share. i’ve got mine. it’s about the only thing myspace has over facebook!
I think that they are trying to do whatever they can to kill some of the celebrities buzz twitter has been collecting lately. Facebook doing a better job with video posts, images and comments and their huge existing userbase might end up being too hard to overcome for twitter. It is going to be an interesting battle!
i think they want these brands to move away from MS.
I come from the days when MS only meant one thing – the company founded by the original Harvard geek dropout Bill Gates.
Seems we’re growing old…
The TechCrunch URL on Facebook isn’t as bad as you make out. Removing some crap that got thrown in, it’s http://www.face...unch/8062627951 . The number at the end sucks, but otherwise, it’s not bad.
really? yeah, i’ll put that on my business card.
hey, catch me at facebook at “facebook dot com forward slash pages forward slash techcrunch forward slash eight zero six two six two seven nine five one.”
v. “facebook dot com slash techcrunch”
I guess it’s time for a new format of business cards. 2×16″ anyone.
Maybe a rollout type business card would be cool for that. Kind of like the old papyrus rolls. Hm wonder how hip that would be?
Facebook could sell those as as merchandise. There you go, a business model…!
I better go to bed now.
The WHOLE reason, more or less, I’ve never liked FB. I’ve been more than surprised over time that it’s grown as well as it has – I’ve had nothing but trouble finding friends and telling them how to find me.
Or, http://www.bit.ly/FBtechcrunch
… or anything similar.
Yeah, names would definitely make it easy to remember the URL for the pages unlike the current style of a number or Id.
Haven’t you heard of http://profile.to/username and the similar ones for groups, bands, etc?
facebook dot com forward slash pages forward slash techcrunch forward slash eight zero six two six two seven nine five one.
got it.
Perhaps a weird thought but why would someone who has a business card put their FB page there instead of their own??? Come on Mike…
Hey, it’s not as bad as “facebook dot com slash pound home dot php slash pages slash techcrunch slash [numbers] question mark sid equals [hexdata].”
I’m not even sure why the numbers are in there. http://www.face...ages/TechCrunch 404s. Why couldn’t they just roll with that?
Mike,
How about this, before Facebook jumps the gun and before Hendrickson disappears forever:
1) Register http://www.facecrunch.com and provide vanity names to everyone for $100.
2) People can then register a vanity name e.g. http://www.face...h.com/anjalisen as well as affiliated social network membership URLS
3) Hendrickson would create a URL redirect which when someone types that url would open up in a new tab(s) the associated FB, MS, etc. links, based on user preference.
4) Get 100,000 people to do so, rake in 10 million, and spend the rest of your life at the Surfer place in Hawaii
From India
Anjali Sen
Wow, facecrunch.com is not registered! I think I’ll go buy it now…
The Facebook #-based URL is a mess for sure. Jesse of SocialToo set up a feature for members to link their SocialToo pages to Facebook.
For example: http://louisgray.socialtoo.com goes directly to my Facebook page and I wouldn’t have to pass out the #’s gobbledygook.
It doesn’t solve Facebook’s problem, but it’s a work-around.
A vanity URL is a domain name, created to point to something to which it is related and indicated in the name of the URL. In many cases this is done by a company to point to a specific product or advertising campaign microsite. In theory, vanity URLs are creatively linked to something making them easier to remember than a more random link.
There are shortening URL tools that allow for vanity URLs
Yep. I didn’t know this was a “special thing” until I signed up a page tonight and was looking for the option to create your own permalink and couldn’t find one. Then I realized Kevin had been “hooked up”
Too bad, I guess.
Part of their monetization for users?
TechFilipino
apropos of nothing:
lol Arrington! Beautiful analogy.
Very funny.
Kids on drugs… omg
Hey Mike,
Here’s an example on why it’s better to have easy URLs like what you have in MySpace. In Cruxle ( http://www.cruxle.com ), you can simply give your MySpace URL and Cruxle will import all your favorite movies, music, books and TV shows automatically, and create personalized recommendations for you — thereby you can discover more movies, music, TV shows and books that you might like. It’s all automatically done by simply entering your MySpace URL. Here’s the link to your Cruxle profile (I entered your MySpace URL):
http://tinyurl.com/d7wkbv
and here’s your personalized recommendations created by Cruxle:
http://tinyurl.com/cemzmq
and here’s your personalized recommendations based on a different demography (from males of age 30 to 40 only):
http://tinyurl.com/bkowwr
You can try it out with other MySpace URLs too. Please give it a shot and let us know your feedback at feedback@cruxle.com
Now, just imagine if you can simply submit your MySpace URL to Amazon or other e-commerce sites and if they can extract all required details from your profile and automatically understand what you like, based on which if they can recommend stuff that you might like and want to purchase, that’ll be a killer app .. Isn’t it? That’s where Cruxle ( http://www.cruxle.com ) is heading to.
No one cares, go away spam.
What Sarah said.
you stink
I resolved the Facebook by just making my own URL that pointed to my facebook because the whole PHP ID?=23qw3q410293402r80938qw09r is really silly.
So, I just made davemora.com/facebook to make it easier for friends and family
Nice! Great idea.
woah cool idea. great work!
Why not http://face.davemora.com – not good from SEO point of view, but easier to remember & spell out.
or just /fb
yep – did the same thing ages ago with a java redirect: http://marismith.com/facebook. Would be nice to have my own facebook.com vanity URL tho!
I did the same thing for our page months ago : http://www.elec...com.au/facebook though for some reason the masses still haven’t caught on – to this day i still have friends telling me about ‘an amazing new facebook app’ that provides a more ‘personalised’ URL
Nice idea and soon to be copied everywhere.
This is a master move from the people behind facebook, I cant wait to be able to change my href properties to facebook/iaaxpage
Good thing!
i inquired the same some time back… and got a similar reply…
http://www.face...615&index=0
Facebook should come up with a naming convention {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/yqm7V2YMYs_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Facebook should come up with a naming convention ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/nh719gyDrd”}}}
Last year I introduced to CEO Mark Zuckerberg und VP Jonathan Heiliger at a meeting in Berlin the idea of creating a .facebook top-level domain. They found the idea instantly compelling. I think the vanity URLs are a just a step towards this idea.
http://www.dotb....de/en/node/748
With this system, though, will I be able to buy your name at .facebook? I’ll sell it back to you at only 200% mark up.
that’s dumb
11233ddddddddddssssddddddddssssxxxxx
Hi
In this 21st century of electronic communications a web site such as Facebook should make vanity URL’s available. If not hard line user will move to a site that makes it easy to see who you are and or where you are or both.
Facebook should sell these vanity URLs for $1.99 each for some easy cash.
Yeah – they will be able to afford the cost of two-three memcached servers – 200M nick-ID pairs are not that of a challenge, come on! At least it’s easy to do “permanently moved” redirects for starters!
This is a long waited feature that should have been integrated a long time ago. That’s the big drawback of Facebook: tiny things that should work. I also hope they will improve some of their features like the chat or the photo upload.
That’s a significant development. I would really like to have my profile page named by my name rather than some random looking numbers. In fact most of the social networking sites have this feature.
So what do you do with all the URLs that link to your various profiles? Put them all on your business card? And since you have a common name what happens when someone else captures the vanity URL first. My solution is to buy a vanity domain and create your own directory site with links to all of your SM profiles. Let the visitor choose which social media they prefer. I currently have http://davidvinge.com pointing to my LinkedIn profile while I build my directory page. The cost of the domain and page is under $10/year, the ability to have one URL on my business card, priceless.
I had a slightly different reply from Michael’s one from Facebook:
“The only Pages that presently have vanity URLs are bands and businesses that have partnered with Facebook in the initial launch of this product or who are in a direct relationship with Facebook with a minimum commitment spend of $50K a month.”
I think that brand hierarchy is not that simple. Facebook and other social networks are not a company’s brand they are just a channel. And if we’ve seen anything in the last few years it is that channels come and go – maybe its better to have you’re own url that puts YOUR product or org at the top … and leaves facebook where it belongs, as a one of many channel
yourcompany.com/facebook
although would be nice to land on the page and not have such a codified url …
Nice Post! Check out my similar site at http://macmaniapodcast.com
Well, it’s about damn time! YAY for vanity URLs!
Facebook is way behind the times with this basic feature. Man, I forgot about those nasty profile, group and fan page “numbers” – those are really terrible conventions for URLs. Hopefully this vanity URL feature will get released asap.
This will be a highly applauded feature for all the “personal branding” fans!
However, my immediate concern is that if this is not well planned out by Facebook, then we are likely to see a flood of “fake” celebrity name grabs, just like we did on twitter. Heck even Facebook already has this problem with all of their un-verified “fan” and “group” pages. For example, my Alma Mater UCLA has a gazillion “Alumni” group and fan pages, which makes it darn near impossible to tell which one is the REAL one.
So, when Facebook finally gets around to releasing vanity URLs, I hope they carefully spec out the validation requirements. They could leverage / adapt the existing set of validation rules already in use for the Facebook company “network” feature, which requires a valid matching company email address to join said company network.
Oh, and Happy Birthday Mike!!
@susanbeebe
Facebok in definately getting wiser
Hasn’t the developent crew over at Facebook ever heard of using 301 redirects?
I wish TechFilipino, 1800-Pharmacie and the locator dude would all go a small boat in the middle of the ocean and drown.
ive alreadly died. what your dealing with is the resurrection.
BornLocator.com – emit yourself
I’ll ask you experts is it better to brand yourself or your company on sites like FB, Twitter and MySpace? So instead of having twitter.com/mysite I should have twitter.com/michelle
Good article, I thought I was just being dumb in not knowing what my Facebook URL was, but apparently it is the “ugly” URL.
FYI, Facebook has a form of vanity URL. E.g., http://www.face...-Kelly/20901205
Sure, you have to remember you fbuid, but it’s better than the URL that’s mentioned in this article.
It’s funny, when I first started using Facebook, I was wondering why it wasn’t there in the first place.
It’s useful, especially since for startups like mine cater to Facebook’s social networking crowd.
I’ve always redirected a personal domain name, http://MarkMayhew.com to my Facebook profile =)
Mike, i dont like your choice of music.
Tiny FB has been around for ages, I don’t know why more people don’t use it.
http://tinyfb.com/nev for instance.
On the other hand it does mean that I got the name I wanted!
Check out how this guy did it:
http://brianolveda.com/
One vanity domain, multiple sites.
I just set up a vanity TinyURL.
-Adam
I agree. Redirecting should be sufficient.
that’s why twitter ROCKS!
come on facebook get with the program!
My Space rocks ! TC readers, Leave facebook right now and get back to the roots ! ^^
Well, ask and you receive — looks like Facebook just gave TechCrunch its own vanity URL as a birthday present for Michael!
http://www.face....com/techcrunch
(The old URL with numbers redirects to the vanity URL, where there’s a message there from twenty minutes ago from a top Facebook staffer saying happy birthday!)
I love it!
And it looks like Mark got his own vanity URL too:
http://www.face.../markzuckerberg
It’s important to note that this is a vanity url to his fan page. This is not Zuckerberg’s profile.
I’m not sure vanity URL is an appropriate term, since it is just a practical matter. Just like having non-random web domains and email addresses isn’t about vanity.
Totally agree.
You already have your own domain, strongly associated to your brand… why not just do “techcrunch.com/facebook” on your card, and redirect that URL to your page? That way you still get the namedropping/brand association, and you can even measure traffic going to fb via your business card if you do the redirect using an HTML page with some tracking on it….
same for twitter, etc – whatever site is of the moment that you want to align yourself with.
isn’t it already what you want Michael;
http://www.face....com/techcrunch
?
Vanity URLs? {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/LqQik9jWtl_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Vanity URLs? ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/BHliBc5vxG”}}}
Hi, Michael (Sorry for my bad english) but I think it would not work for facebook why? Simple
It going to be hard because in Myspace you select your vanity URL myspace.com/Michael2336 so nobody else can select that same URL right? but the problem is that’s not your complete name or its a nickname, and facebook want’s you to use your real name.
So in facebook let’s say you have facebook.com/MichaelArrington and there’s someone that lives in Colombia with the same name, what are they going to do put facebook.com/MichaelArrington2 or maybe facebook.com/co/MichaelArrington but still tricky because they maybe more people with the same name in colombia.
I think its to late, also in facebook you can change your name so that means that you were something like “Michael Arrington” (fbook.com/MichaelArrington) and you change your name to “Michael J. Arrington” so now your URL is (fbook.com/MichaelJArrington) so you lost the other URL and you can’t get it back.
Sure this will work for companys with their brands but in terms of users I think they have some trouble sorting that out.
If anyone want to contact me ernesto(@)prepabox.com
(Hope understand my english)
Ernesto. I agree. The fact that fbook is based off names does make it tricky to have a url system based off names. However, like myspace, users could be allowed to lock in a non-changeable url to avoid future confusion. This still doesn’t solve the problem of multiple people with the same name.
@Adam
Yes but still is a problem imagine that they are 2 people Adam’s then how is fbook going to assing the URL (fbook.com/adam and fbook.com/adam1)
Thanks for your response.
This is Facebook answer to Twitter. Now people, or name brands, can make profiles and connect to users without having the approval process. Eventually Facebook will have a Twitter-like stream of all added pages’ news. Such a brilliant company.
Brilliance is not something normally associated with companies that produce things like Beacon. If they were so great, they would have had this feature long ago. They are acting more like the Microsoft of today then the one of old.
I agree with ppl saying they should sell it. They have to make money somehow.
I hate the term ‘vanity urls’. It’s no more vanity than having your preferred name listed in the phone book (remember those?).
This seems like such old news — Friendster has been doing this for a while now, and I don’t see why it should be a problem.
Nice post! Check out my site too at http://macmaniapodcast.com.