Well, the big day came and went and it seems to have gone by without any technical glitches. In fact, according to Mashable, 200,000 Facebook usernames were registered in the first three minutes after the site went live. (As of Sunday night, the number was close to 6 million.)

Even though I still have doubts that it will have any real value to me, I went ahead and registered for www.facebook.com/ElizabethKricfalusi. (Fortunately, since I live on the west coast, I didn't have to stay up until midnight to sign up.

Shockingly, my name was still available. :) Actually, all of my friends, even the ones with more common names, had no problem getting theirs either. In fact, the only case I've heard of so far where someone didn't get the one he wanted was Darren Rowse of ProBlogger, which has a certain ironic element to it, since he's one of the most social-media-savvy guys out there. But according to his Twitter stream that night, it seems like the person who got it is willing to relinquish the name. I'll be interested to see if Facebook allows this because, while they say they don't allow name transfers, they are trying to ensure that trademarks are protected. (I don't know whether ProBlogger is officially trademarked by Darren, but it's certainly widely associated with him.)

If you haven't signed up but think you might, here's something interesting I learned during the process. When they said that the usernames could only contain letters, numbers, or a period, I had thought ElizabethKricfalusi would be considered different from Elizabeth.Kricfalusi. But it's not. If you sign up for either of those versions (in any combination of upper- and lower-case characters), both versions will take you to your profile. In fact, the period seems to be ignored altogether, so you can put as many as you want in your name and they won't affect it.

I've also discovered that your username doesn't display in your search results, so I'm still not clear how this is supposed to help the situation when you search on Jane Smith and get hundreds of results with no other identifying information...

But there's some great news on the Pages front! I had said in my earlier post that only public profiles with more than 1,000 fans were eligible to get a username. Now, according to the Facebook Pages, er, Page, they will be able to get one as of June 28th. I honestly don't know if this was part of the original plan, or if Facebook responded to feedback it received. But, either way, it's a good development for those of us who administer Pages that have a smaller number of fans, so who have even more reason to try to find new ones through other channels (where the easier username will be very helpful).

So, overall, the program seems to be a success. If you have any experiences—good or bad—you'd like to share, please leave a comment below.

On a final note, check out this Mashable link for a good laugh: 15 Silliest Facebook Vanity URLs.

Posted in Facebook, Social Media, Updates