Friday night is the Facebook vanity URL landrush (first reported on May 31, announced yesterday officially). At 9:01 pm PST on Friday, just log into Facebook and grab the name you want before someone else does.
While the masses (that’s you) will be fighting for that perfect name on Friday night, some lucky few people won’t need to bother waiting in line. Facebook employees have already grabbed theirs (taking Facebook.com/Mike, which is what I wanted). And apparently “key journalists” won’t have to wait in line, either.
In an email today, Facebook told me “We wanted to let you know that we decided to reserve usernames for the key journalists and outlets we work with. Look out for an email from someone on the communications team with more details.” Other writers here at TechCrunch got the same email.
I feel sort of bad about posting this, since Facebook is actually doing us a favor. But I also think it’s kind of BS that Facebook is giving some people, employees included, first shot at the names. My guilt only extends so far, though. You suckers wait in line. I’m grabbing my name in advance.
I got the email as well … looking forward to it
Not just journalists, but top brands as well. We got a dozen urls for some of our clients. Facebook has done a great job taking care of us.
I’m a correspondent for ABC News and we have yet to receive and email – trying to track down a contact at Facebook and would be greatly appreciative of any assistance here.
Also, several of us in various silos at ABC News are doing stories on people who are waiting up to grab their name – I’m looking for people in NYC for a news package – I can be contacted on Twitter if anyone in NYC plans to do this and is available this afternoon or tomorrow.
Thanks for posting this.
On a second note … why complain about having the inside connection?
transparency. sort of obvious to me.
Well now it’s pretty transparent how it will play out
FB wants publicity, positive publicity. So a favour to journalists.
But it tells about journalists’ ethics to accept the bait.
It sure does, but did we really need another “tell,” when we already knew? I don’t think so.
It’s Quid pro quo, Clarice.
The trade is:
We return your phone calls and do you favors, such as vanity FUs (Facebook Usernames), you write nice-nice. If not, your cutoff from access and/or we pull advertising. if you’re a career journalist, you want/can’t have your access cut off or your career dies (unless you knock it out of the park ala Bob Woodward).
Well, I just started a blog called FaceBookAwesome, now can I get my vanity url please? I promise to write only good things and not criticize lack of revenue streams or profitability or ponzi scheme activity or russian kgb data sharing
Http://facebook.com/loic
Apparently the “first in line” privileges also “break the rules” on name length? The FB blog says clearly, “Your username must be at least five characters in length” but yours is looking like only four letters to me. What am I missing?
you son of a bitch……
So Mike was wrong – it seems that ANY idiot can get a vanity URL early – and a 4-letter username at that.
show off
Well said, the transparency bit. like that.
I see what you mean Mike, hard to find people who fight provileges these days especially among those who are enjoying the privileges…
The special club guys.
Not that Facebook means anything anymore, but have you checked out Google Wave?
So now that /Mike is taken, what are you going to go for Mike? /michaelarrington or /mikearrington?
/awesome is my first choice.
Well played, sir
LOL
Legen – wait for it – dary
how about /mgLover
Well clearly this is BS – I don’t give a shite about the names.
But from what you are saying – you can get less than 5 characters ?
i.e. /mike – 4. according to the username TOS – must be greater than 5?
WTF gives?
I am a blogger why haven’t they offered me the fast track? If they had I would have wrote a publicity blog post for them!
Because your blog only has one reader, you.
thats kind of lame
their servers are going to get crushed on friday/saturday
Hopefully a lot of people will not be on their computers since it’s friday night/saturday morning.
How is Facebook giving its own employees first dibs BS? If you worked for Facebook, would you want some 17-yr old punk from Kansas with facebook.com/mike? I didn’t think so! Also, could you imagine the uproar and loss of morale within FBk if employees couldn’t have their choice of usernames?
yo mike…
when someone spits on you in public again.. remeber this moment!!!!
for some people, it’s not nice to go around bragging about your connections!!
I hardly considered this post “bragging”
Yeah, this post isn’t bragging. It’s outing Facebook’s attempt to curry favor with journalists, who should be smarter than that. Would you write a more “positive” story because of this? Not likely, but it’s about perception and credibility.
How is this bragging?
Brag = “To boast or show off”
Mike Arrington: “You suckers wait in line. I’m grabbing my name in advance.”
nuf said.
When someone breaks your nose for spitting on someone else, remember this post.
When someone kicks your ass in public, remember this comment.
Just think about it: Mike didn’t ask FB to give him a vanity URL and brag about it; he just reported what FB told him. Is this too hard for you to grok? If so, then please step away from the keyboard slowly, turn your computer off, and stay away.
Vanity Urls? Who cares.
Yeah! this is total nonsense. embarrassing.
there are people in africa starving and this is whats important to you?
I think there are other sites and organizations covering that.
+1
And instead of giving them food… you are just talking about them here? hmmm…
Who are you giving food? We are sure healthy ..Go ask the NBA players and Olympic medallists where they come from
Glad you were able to tear yourself away.
so stay up and try to get /starving or maybe /bigmac :-p
I thought there’s “at least 5 characters” restriction? Or it’s just for the general masses then.
If someone really got facebook.com/mike, then FB also threw those journalists a bone by relaxing their 5-character requirement. From the blog:
Your username must be at least five characters in length and only include alphanumeric characters (A-Z, 0-9), or a period or full stop (”.”).
FYI. “Mike” isn’t a journalist. He’s a FB employee.
Just get mike.tel instead – the ultimate vanity URL for all of your social networking profiles / other contact information.
.TEL’s are a joke and a waste of money unless they let you host your own.
damn they took david! I was gonna be the cooliest guy on facebook. God I hate special treatment…hmm…
/sean already taken of course, looks like another employee
And at this point, the dolphins departed earth and said “thanks for all the fish!”
This is a real opportunity for me to do something incredibly ordinary
hahaha.. good one
>>it’s kind of BS<<
Facebook is BS.
People are just stupid to give FB such value (of their time and energy). They in return serve you advertising off of your own personal data (don’t provide any personal data, you still get location based Ads).
And what you get in return?
BS!
They *really* relaxed the rules… /c forwards to /pan for yet another FB employee
blah.. time to logoff fb. permanently
The people waiting on the line was from World War 2 representing the Jews forming a line at the ghetto. I wonder why this photo was used instead.
I’m getting /zuckerberg
Is Facebook putting any type of controls around people doing what was done with domain names or with Twitter?
If not, I hope that they get ready for a backlash. I am sure that tomorrow, someone will have already grabbed Dell or Microsoft (unless they are doing the same thing with companies).
Yes. Only people who have created their Facebook profiles before Facebook announced the vanity URL’s on their blog with be eligible for one on Friday.
Other users will have to wait! This way, there is no cybersquatting (assuming that’s what your referring to).
Who else is hoping the Potato Growers Association sticks it to pro golf again and that Sting gets taken by someone other then, uhm, Sting?
I’ll be taking index.php
Lots more to this techcrunch crew. Advance FB scramble taking place now. Is the FB crew afraid of lawsuits if a brand name got scooped up?
Even FB URL remapping of brands is in place. Example: go to http://www.facebook.com/coke and you are redirected to http://www.face...k.com/coca-cola neat trick if you can pull it off.
Thats BS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Worth pointing out that LinkedIn had custom URLs for some time now. Don’t recall gold rush there. Then again “awesome” is probably not a good choice in a profesional context.
That’s because no one gives two shits about LinkedIn
exactly
Just don’t steal asshat from me!
seems kind of silly to me
I have to say i “get” why FB would do this, but I think it’s so disappointing a move on their part. I fail to see how it’s not a bribe-like maneuver.
Oh, and just wondering… when did Loic LeMeur become a “key journalist”? Influential in the Valley? Sure. But “key journalist” in the eyes of Facebook? Really?
looks like /loic is his fan page. FB has been changing many of those over to vanity urls over the last few months, including /techcrunch. lots of brand names and trademarks on the pages, so i think it makes sense.
I have had facebook.com/loic for months Jeremy… as a vanity url for my Facebook “fans” page.
Sorry it pisses you off however I agree at least on one point with you, I am not a key journalist and do not pretend or aim at becoming one.
understood, it makes perfect sense and doesn’t actually piss me off at all!
Calling your readers (customers) ‘Suckers’ is not a very journalist behavior.
C’mon.
Seriously Yossi? Here’s some advice… go get laid tonight to free up some of that tension. And if you can’t do it for free which you probably can’t, pay for it.
Michael was clearly joking and poking fun at the fact that he was getting preferential treatment.
As for the Facebook vanity rules… I understand both sides of the argument, but who really cares. Anyone who wants a vanity url can just do yourdomain.com/facebook and redirect it to your current ugly facebook url. Not a huge deal! If your name is Tom Smith, sure you’re gonna get beat to the punch, but chances are you already did with the .com as well.
Although vanity url’s can be useful they sure as hell didn’t do much for MySpace.
i’m gonna get myself /home.php
lol nice one !!
faboulous! LOL
I’m a journalist…
Here’s something funny, I went to techcrunch.com/mike and it gives a me page not found. Mike can’t you give yourself your own page on your own domain? Heck your employees too.
Good Idea !! Maybe Mike can create a http://techcrunch.com/mike page and forward it to his Facebook Profile Page
And surely techcrunch.com/mike will rank higher on Google than facebook.com/mike
So if you dont get your favorite id on Facebook, get one on Techcrunch and setup a forward to Facebook
just replace FB with TC, that would rock
Well, I didn’t get a sodding email. Damn those people don’t they know who I am?
No, I suppose it’s obvious, they don’t.
I wonder if it’s coz I work in print…
Make a product scarce and people will come.
A limited amount of supply and people are eager to get one.
The hero of today is the loser of tomorrow. See MySpace. What’s the value of an url on MySpcace today? Bought any country or island on MySpace lately?
One has to question himself: what is the real value? Will you be better off with your own url on Facebook?
See the story of the tulip mania in Holland (http://en.wikip...iki/Tulip_mania)
From the same people who invented the stock market: Amsterdam.
If you have a “fan page” and a website, what do you prefer when people search for your brand on google :
- have your facebook vanity url shown first
- have your official website shown first
I guess this vanity url thing will have a massive impact on google indexing of brands. Not everybody wants to have on google their facebook profile shown on top of a page they “totally” own and control.
http://dashes.c...-usernames.html
Thats all i got to say…
that was damn funny.
Best of all, Mike, you can help make so much of that timeline come true.
Dang, I knew I should have been a tech journalist instead of a music journalist. We get so very few perks anymore. Anyone from FB that might be reading this…take pity on a poor music journalist and hook me up. What if I beg?
You might want to check the terms and conditions of this. I believe that only pages with 1,000+ fans are allowed to apply for a vanity url.
At least they are doing something. Even a land grab needs some order. Yahoo was a mess when they opened up ymail.
Why did I deserve to get advertise at ymail.com ? Just because I was up at 3am?
Hey, FB is going about this the wrong way IMHO. Why? A few years ago i was part of the launch team of a Startup Mobile operator. Due to the mobile op being only the 2nd operator and you could choose your mobile #, there was obviously going to be a land rush of easy to remember numbers i.e +971 xx 123 45678 / 222 3333 etc … Company employees started applying for these numbers, they held a meeting and said the FFG
Our customers are the most important to us, what message does it send to them if we assign high value numbers internally? The CEO set an example by taking the first Randomly allocated no.
Its a 1 of the leading SOC media companies dont get community.
u are so right Ismail! – BTW funny MySpace is going realname and FB is going vanity URL…
It’s something different than usual webism
.
nice for teenagers.
Flip facebook and all those who got their names first. They’ll get some flipping good spam in their messages.
This is so dull I just shed a little tear.
Um, what about the obvious?
Why not register myname.com… setup a redirect of myname.com/facebook ?
and
myname.com/twitter
and
myname.com/myspace
etc..
Mike — If you accept this, you’re a hypocrite. Facebook may be calling you a “key journalist” (obviously they love you since you’ve written about them more than 200 times this year) but you harp weekly on how you’re not a journalist and that journalism is dead. Call yourself what you are – a glorified blogger – and not a “key journalist.”
+1
It’s a trick! Everyone knows that a thousand geeks were going to try to register http://www.face...chael-Arrington for lulz as soon as registration went live. Michael invented this post so that they would think there was no point trying, allowing him to safely register it. Am I right?
Vanity URLs? This is what gets you excited?