A Couple Little Nifty Facebook And Twitter Username Tweaks

8234_171321916728_20531316728_3583314_4744826_nSo, you remember those Facebook vanity names? Yeah, well starting today they’re even more useful. That’s because you now use them to sign in to your Facebook account.

One of the most annoying things about logging into Facebook was that it still required you to use an email address as your username. The problem is that most of the time those are much longer than regular user names. So this move to the vanity URLs is a nice one. On the downside, this may make it slightly easier for hackers to crack open your account as usernames are public while most email addresses probably weren’t.

Screen shot 2009-09-17 at 6.29.52 PMNot to let Facebook take all the username glory today, Twitter also rolled out a small tweak. Now, your @NAME will work in your Twitter URL. So, for example, if I direct people to twitter.com/@parislemon, that works just as it would without the “@”. I have no idea why they did this, but I have to believe there is some reason.

Earlier this week, Facebook rolled out its update to let you tag friends in your status messages using the @ syntax. Of course, there still is no real interoperable way to connect Twitter usernames and Facebook usernames, as that might be asking too much from this growing rivalry.

[thanks Peter]