So, 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.
Not 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]
I suspect something big. Without some kind of “what’s going next?” speculation, this “@” addition is nothing.
This @ thing sounds strange to me. What use it is to us if we access our page with /username or /@username. Maybe some big plans are on the way!
It’s probably a useability issue. They may have found that people where trying to use the @ previously. It’s just like misspelling the domain name.
Google is going to make it so if you type @username it will go directly to their twitter page.
Hope this FB update applies to Facebook connect as well. That seems to be where I have to manually relog the most often.
yeah, definitely agree
Agree too!
*shrug* Seesmic now allows you to update FB Fan pages after the update that came out today. So, I’m guessing it is a direct result of being able to log in via your username.
I had a feeling this would happen. At TechCrunch50 when Facebook was giving their demo on the new prototypes feature, the guy logged in with his username and not his password.
*with his username and not his email
you’re right. good eye.
Nice catch.
When twitter and facebook make the @ interoperable with @username fb @username tw options we will see an explosion in cross messaging and applications written to consume and distribute those.
Vanity names on these mega sites are becoming more and more like domain names every day. But I like the move to clean vanity urls and using the username instead of email, all things to simplify facebook and make it more usable.
It’s interesting you say that. There has been a trend away from usernames to email for login. This was done for usability. It’s a lot easier to remember your email address. Since they are simply adding the username option, this really isn’t much of a move at all. Besides, with web browsers today, which can remember the inputs, you don’t need to be typing so much.
You’re right, this really isn’t that big of a deal… Vanity names and the clean urls they come with are still cool though.
I was hoping that the url http://twitter.com/@username would go to your twitter home, with my user name in the textarea ready to shoot me a reply, like a shorthand for http://twitter....tus=%40username … but it wouldn’t ask me to login if I wasn’t on Twitter, it’d just show me the feed.
not a bad idea of how they could have used that.
I think the reason they allowed the “@” symbol in the Twitter URL is because whenever celebrities talk about their Twitter account on television they say “yeah my username is ATdonttrythis”, for example. People who are new to twitter might type that in, and now it’ll work!
Big plans for the “@” ??? Maybe, be but at very least @ delivers common branding. When the world see @bobschwartz now a days it knows this is twitter name that can be followed. Perhaps it is less obvious when just part of a http://www.twit...com/bobschwartz as we have become acustom to those just being urls that people can create.
Whatever they have in mind, at very least i like it from the perspective of more twitter branding…
Not exactly true. The @person syntax is popular when referring to other users on facebook.
I think its worth noting that facebook is slowing moving towards pushing out their own email service. Thats why they give you the option to sign in with your username: just as you do with your email at gmail, yahoo etc… Facebook is just doing this in small smart steps!
I think its a smart move from facebook trying to slowly push out the Facebook Email service under the hood. Now they can simply say, use facebook as your email service – no need to use gmail, yahoo mail etc… It would just seem silly to keep logging in with a non @facebook email. Any thoughts on this?
Wow, what the hell. That’s even more weird. There’s seems to be a bug with Facebook Connect. It blanked out all the comments and made them by me. Hmmm.
The Facebook login is great for those that got the vanity names and those that did not get a name, need to get one.
I don’t see the need for the @ in the twitter url either.
I’m surprised so many people still manually login. Don’t you guys have password managers? Opera comes with one.
Also, this site and others should focus on supporting OpenID. Facebook connect is temporary.
Some of us worry a little more about security than you do apparently.
my twitter and facebook usernames are different, this might be true for many people. So syncing the @mentions of twitter & facebook may not work.
My guess is this…. they want to make the ‘@’ sign turn into a link automatically everywhere, just like when you type www or http:// in a document. Meaning, they want the Twitter id to be the id of individuals on the internet.
remember the statement ” …..to be the pulse of the internet”
Maybe twitter wanted to save some server juice by not having to parse out the @ whenever you had another twitter users name in your tweet. One less thing that has to be processed.