As you no doubt heard last night, the whole Facebook vanity URL grab thing was big. Within seven minutes of the service being available last night, 345,000 users grabbed one. Within 15 minutes, over a half million had, Facebook spokesperson Larry Yu told Bloomberg. But who got the best one.
The best one I’ve seen by far, was grabbed by Christine Shipley of San Francisco. Rather than go for facebook.com/christine.shipley or even facebook.com/shipley, she went with facebook.com/default.aspx. Yes, her name could easily be confused as the default landing page for Facebook. (Though, savvy users will know that the site is actually built in PHP, and not ASP, which the .aspx extension suggests).
Not surprisingly, people are already trying to sell their Facebook vanity URLs as well. The service Assetize, which we wrote about yesterday, already has 4 accounts for sale. The accounts listed are: cotman, pokerbook, sexybook and shekhar. The listing amount for each is “best offer” — none have any bids.
But according to the service, one name has already sold, though it has to be bogus. Assetize just started partially blocking out names sold so you can’t see which ones were purchased, but I loaded the page earlier and saw that it was facebook.com/alex. Apparently, it sold for 99,999,999.99 — so unless it went to Alex Rodriguez, I say this buying and selling system is already broken. What else is odd about this is that alex is a 4-letter URL, which is against Facebook’s rules. So unless it was a Facebook employee who got the URL and was selling it, the whole thing seems to be a sham.
Not everyone was happy with the results of the landgrab. Michael was one of the unlucky ones who didn’t get the name he wanted, even though he originally broke the story. Knowledge, it seems, isn’t always power.
[thanks Loic]
No one can beat my url.
http://www.face...k.com/sexythang
That is also pretty good.
I wonder how many new friend requests Christine has had today. Would be cool to know.
340
341
Wha! Thanks for tellin!
Very cool idea… what made you decide to get the default url?
LOL
Ha! And I knew her before she was famous…
And I will be the nth friend
there can’t be a default page without a EULA 
Ha ha, good one!
Count me as one too!!!
Clever but how often do people really enter in default.aspx – if a person knows what that is (asp default page) they would know facebook isn’t written in asp.
Pretty epic ya? lol. This was more fun than new years watching that count down.
Mine is also pretty good
http://facebook...om/pugglesworth
that is also awesome: http://www.face....com/parislemon
I’m jealous of the guys that got http://www.face...oc.koobecaf.www and http://facebook...om/moc.koobecaf
yes, those are truly something to be envied
R they?
It’s a fun joke but will any1 ever type those?
sometimes jokes are not only fun, but also subtle
Ok, I’m The Friend !
http://www.face...k.com/thefriend
http://www.facebook.com/LOLfml
:]
Seriously? I don’t see why it’s “clever”, why would anyone really land on default.aspx if the site is written in php? So aside from a couple of dorks who think “sexydude” is also a witty and clever name, does this amuse anyone?
I got facrbook.com/movie so I think I did ok.
Pretty sure that was /alex doing some XSS to on assetize. pwned.
or http://www.facebook.com/vulva
Well, in Tuscany “vulva” stands for pussy, I thought you should know that.
In everywhere.
Mulva?
Dolores!
hahah!! its been a while since i’v seen a seinfeld reference! loved it….
Ooh, those wacky Tuscans!
That’s my roommate, haha!
How come the default.aspx vanity takes 45 seconds to load, and randomly crashes?
If that’s a joke, it’s a pretty good one.
of course it’s a joke.
I don’t get it. Now if it was written in Java for RoR then that would be funny.
Have you ever written a web app with ASP.NET? It’s like roasting a turkey with a belt sander
@Brian – I have, and its better than Java, RoR, PHP or whatever lame framework you use. I’ve never regretted switching to .Net
@Jason: .NET is clunky. It tries to be a “Framework” by having everything under the sun. Being lightweight is what I like in a language/framework, and if that’s lame, I really don’t know what to say to you. I’ve never regretted writing from the ground up with PHP.
Also, for writing scalable apps, .NET isn’t exactly that economically feasible until Mono gets considerably further down the road. I would certainly regret writing large apps with .NET for that reason.
(ps. if it’s any consolation, the comment you made here was handled by a “lame” language)
Brian, sorry, you don’t know what you’re talking about. ASP.NET is superior to PHP, unless one has no clue what he/she’s doing and only knows php. It scales far better too. I could easily write an app that handles 10x the performance & requests of php or java w/ the same hardware.
You’re right, Facebook sucks – Because its PHP
Are you serious?
C’mon folks. This is almost as constructive as a “OMG WINDOZE PWNS MAC!” argument.
Only complete n00bs put out blanket statements like; “.NET is the better than X”.
I’ll leave it as an exercise for the n00b to figure out exactly why.
Speed is a silly reason to base your language choice on, but the facts say that Asp.Net is a faster language, it is not even close – look at the numbers: http://naspinsk...comparison.aspx
Anyone saying otherwise is either repeating what they hear based on no facts, or referring to classic ASP which hasn’t been used in years.
@Devv mainly: I do know what I’m talking about. I’ve written with both and have formed my opinion from the highs and lows of both environments.
Sure, ASP.NET executes faster then PHP generally—due to being compiled. There are ways to compile PHP to get it to run faster (http://eaccelerator.net/), but I don’t have any hard numbers for you.
When it comes to writing manageable apps that can be quickly modified (like Wordpress for instance), ASP.NET just doesn’t compare to PHP. PHP is open source, isn’t constrained to a single platform, and can be written procedurally in a clean, refined fashion. (Minus PHP namespaces, don’t get me going on those.)
Running a farm of servers with licensed copies of Windows isn’t exactly too “scalable” unless you’ve got the funds available to pay through the nose. As you said, ASP.NET can run faster, which makes scaling by numbers a little less important. However, with responsible development and proper optimization, PHP functions quickly, reliably, and cost-effectively.
Look, if you wish to be the typical “php’s only used by kiddie developers who don’t know what they’re talking about,” please get your facts straight.
Personally I find that being able to actually use classes that aren’t bolted on, and having intellisense makes me much more productive than PHP, where it’s really easy to make typos that are hard to catch due to being a weakly-typed language. Plus when comparing a framework like CodeIgniter to ASP.NET MVC, the design of your code is pretty similar, except using different languages; and in this case the strong-typing is a plus.
way to slap a fan.
You win.
You’re all wrong… Kids these days… Jeesh…
CGI written in perl is the only thing worth learning these days.
TI BASIC booyah
@TS: Are you kidding? Writing your CGI code in C is the only way to go. PERL is for young hippies!
i don’t get how tihs assetize thing is supposed to work. i though you couldn’t change you url once you registered it.
A previous article about this mentioned that what CAN be sold in order to exchange vanity URLs is the log in credentials from the account itself.
Having a unique name helps — I just reserved mine about twenty minutes ago, since I decided to go out last night instead of sit around and try to get a username.
And now that it’s publicized, I’m sure Facebook is going to ask her to change it. Whoops!
Still, what fun for the time she did have it.
she’s probably exhausted from all that fun anyway
I’m pretty much expecting it any time now. I’ve gotten some messages from Facebook employees with their personal opinions, however. They seem to have gotten the joke.
Christine,
Can I be your boyfriend?
Wow, what an exceptionally creepy statement.
We are the only wholesaler now on Facebook/wholesaler and Twitter/wholesaler
some random person has appleinc – http://www.face...ok.com/appleinc
Erm… that isn’t some random guy… look again:
Networks: Apple
Actually i was first to post it on assetize my url is http://facebook.com/toohot
And did anyone buy it?
Lol.. No Siegler not even a single bid, I wont sell it anyways i just put it there after reading the previous post just to see how much of an offer i get
Lmfao : You should have told me before i would have gone fot it, They would have paid millions for it… Lol
i will give you three cents.
Too bad it wasn’t “Sohot” there’s a hot sauce company in Canada with that name.
i came before with facebook.com/rebate , testing the waters and it sort of doesn’t work, i mean the assets thing… nobody wants vanity urls… but anyways i chose to keep it till end of life
Wait…why wouldn’t Mike Arrington get his vanity URL…didn’t TechCrunch publish an article about how journalists didn’t have to wait until the 9pm start time…Facebook not considering you guys journalists?
http://www.tech...o-wait-in-line/
Yeah, they reserved /mikearrington for him, but he opted to try and get his own, but all were taken, as he noted.
I thought facebook was built in php? I wonder if index.php was available.
Agreed, I think the homepage is PHP.
Yep, but most people won’t know that.
most peope won’t also EVER write out default.aspx when going to a site, they will just stop at the .com /.net / what have you
so while this is pretty awesome for geeks, that’s all it is
Mines Just As Good As Default.aspx
http://facebook.com/staff.aspx
No, it’s not.
i’m happy with mine: http://www.face...tumn.waldenpond
I’m happy with mine too! Facebook.com/TheSeth
That’s super clever… are you sure you spelled ’seth’ right?
* http://www.face...ook.com/TheSeth
Facebook is built with PHP, not ASP. the default landing page is facebook.com/home.php.
try it, while signed in to facebook, enter facebook.com in the address bar.
Yeah I know that, realize my wording was weird though — was just trying to say that it’s a standard default page you might see if your site was built in ASP — but I took that out. Thanks.
http://www.face...ook.com/myspace
That was actually the first name I tried to register.
lol i tried microsoft to be first then indonesia, but no luck
Not that I care (and for those that saw my last entry in another posting) none of my friends asked me to get their names for them.
Funny, I was wondering when some smart-ass would try that stunt. If they did, it will probably be one of those taken down first.
All these names can be doubled up when using the . to separate words and names.
I have a few different accounts that I used for various purposes, I got my last name for my regular one and I got http://www.face...levelandsteamer for one of my dupes and http://www.face...surprisebuttsex for the other one.
Got up at 6am to register http://www.face....com/bullyinguk for my charity.
Was suprised at how smooth Facebook handled this one, very well done.
Fan us if you want.
John
Pretty clever and Christine should get the deserved attention from TC. But in the end she’ll probably get screwed when they take it away and someone had already registered the names she wanted. Gotta appreciate the ingenuity tho.
Yeah, sometimes you have to struggle for art.
Art imitates life. so there’s not the only place to struggle.
i dont understand why they would take it away though? how does this harm facebook in any way?
Yeah hopefully they won’t but it could be confusing to some people. We’ll see.
default.aspx is pretty clever/funny.
pleasure MG, have a great week-end
I was thinking of grabbing http://www.face...com/gefiltefish (obvious business opportunities), but decided it would be morally wrong…
Plenty of folks were out to land the URL that would best describe their business. http://www.face...com/funeralhome may not be the first page on Facebook everyone starts with, but in the end…
i was there at 12:00 sharp. at 12:05 everything you could think of was already taken.
daniel gibson is the shit; he got my name and 1.6 other million danilels that are in this planet.
i bet the .net developers are jealous. http://www.face...ok.com/wp-admin is not too bad either…
I tried registering index.php, index.html, and eric.php, they disallowed all of those. I just assumed they disallowed all the common extensions, and stopped there. Guess I gave up too soon.
You guys have no foresight.
I got:
http://www.face...com/solarenergy
I was wondering how well FB vanity URLs will play with Google search results. Any ideas?
????
The only jealous people will be balding gray haired pony tail (former) beatniks who do not understand the amount of pollution that is created to manufacture one solar cell.
good one default.aspx is cool!!!
Sounds good, Arrington
Has anyone noticed that you can put a “.” or “-” anywhere in your name and the URL still works?
http://facebook.../m-iguelalvarez
http://facebook...m-iguela.lvarez
http://facebook.../miguel-alvarez
http://facebook...ig.uel.alvar.ez
Ya like:
http://facebook...au-.-.-.-.-.-er
Yep I noticed it ;
I selected facebook.com/firstnamelastname and if i type in facebook.com/firstname.lastname it still goes to the same page tried it on different computers and browsers.
There was also http://www.face....com/index.aspx as well…
I love the default.aspx, but isn’t this a shameless plug for Microsoft? What’s wrong with good ol’ index.htm or index.html?
Not true about the four-letter URL’s being verboten. I got the one I wanted: piet. And it works just fine. And it’s not for sale.
My favorite so far was http://www.face...oc.koobecaf.www
I decided to land the highly desirable: http://www.face...tusernamehonest
;-D
Facebook has reserved some of the URLs which can result in ambiguity like index.php, home.php etc. They should have reserved URLs like default.aspx as well. But any way who cares.
She must be proud of her URL :
http://www.face...ok.com/sexygirl
at least it´s not some bearded dude… i hope.
awesome
pretty happy I got my name http://www.face...m/stevegonzalez
Hahahha, I just made my moms account http://www.face...k.com/suggested
Pure goldmine! lol of laughs at least
cobwebs was the best I got
I got:
http://www.face....com/sweetlover
nicee!!
But Facebook redirects using JavaScript[1], so I thought this fitting:
http://www.face...w.location.href
[1] http://simonwil...acebookdebacle/
There wasn’t much competition for http://www.face.../Robert.Tolmach, but I had to fight Dad tooth and nail for it.
http://www.face...om/readme.shtml
http://www.face...k.com/superslut
and how about this one?
http://www.zidd...assavi.jpg.html
I thought of it too late and had to give it to a friend instead -
http://www.face....com/index.cfml
I ended up with
http://www.facebook.com/torgo
Most ColdFusion developers choose to just use ‘.cfm’ — a friend was going to grab ‘index.cfm’ but decided against it.
Surprised you actually know about ColdFusion though…