17 Comments »Millions of users counted down the seconds to the launch of the Facebook username land rush on Saturday, 12:01 AM EDT. While many journalists had their usernames pre-reserved, those journalists are still waiting for their usernames to process although Facebook says that they are still in the queue to get processed. The more entertaining portion of the night was a phenomenon called facesquatting: the process of stealing a username that another person or brand wanted to use.
That may not be what you thought facesquatting is. If you thought it was something that has a sexual connotation you would be correct which is why I don’t recommend that you go looking for facesquatting pictures in Google images. One facesquatting image ended up at the top of Digg over the weekend and made it on to Gawker this morning. A gentleman named Mike Pence decided to take the Facebook username land grab opportunity to take his friend’s name, “obiefernandez”. The result was the picture below.
It’s an entertaining image but it’s exactly the type of thing that was expected to occur in the Facebook username land rush of 2009 as predicted by Anil Dash. After 12:01 AM, a number of users began claiming that “/” had become the new “@” as the primary topic of discussion on Twitter had become the Facebook username. More important than the so called “facesquatters” was the fact that most users were able to get their usernames without a hitch.
As Larry Yu of Facebook told Bloomberg, more than 500,000 usernames within the first 15 minutes. Additionally more than 3 million people registered their Facebook usernames in the first 12 hours after the land rush began. It was an impressive showing and as a number of videos circulating Facebook showed, there was a team of engineers on standby to monitor server load to make sure that everything went smoothly.
Days later things are running well and we’ve started searching for some of the more entertaining facebook usernames that were grabbed. Many of them happened to be relatively childish but I’ll include them anyways since the aggressive facesquatters were also relatively childish. Here are 9 usernames that we found to be most interesting:
/thedistrict - I’m not sure why I liked this username so much but I thought having a username called “thedistrict” was interesting. Perhaps it’s because I live in the only real district in the country, the District of Columbia.
/socialmedia - If you want to become the top social media consultant in the world, having a username like “socialmedia” is a pretty good place to start. Then again if you decide to change your name at a later date you may not be too happy that you kept a username that references your past job.
/error.404 - This one is pretty self explanatory. Unfortunately when you go to this page you don’t actually get a 404 error. Instead you end up with the profile of Jon Mulligan.
/moc.koobecaf - This username is facebook.com in reverse and while it’s entertaining, it’s not the quickest this to type.
/upload - If you visit this username you won’t be able to upload anything. You’ll only be able to contact a guy named Daniel Axin.
/preferences - Yet another play on trying to appear to be part of the Facebook website.
/default.aspx - This is probably one of the more entertaining usernames that we’ve found. Default.aspx is the default directory file loaded up on .NET applications. Christine Shipley of RIT came up with this one and has now received plenty of props from people around the web.
/cnnbrk - This person thought that they would try to profit off of the insanely popular Twitter account cnnbrk that was eventually acquired by CNN. Unfortunately the person who reserved this username ended up connecting it with a user profile and not a Facebook Page, making it unlikely that this will turn into anything.
/theusername - I’m still debating whether or not this username is a good one. At the least it’s clever.
Did you get the username that you wanted? What creative Facebook usernames have you found?
I think the “real” landrush will begin when they open it up to fan pages that had under 1,000 fans.
http://www.facebook.com/getonit
http://www.facebook.com/sexygirl
http://www.facebook.com/theworld
http://www.facebook.com/looser
http://www.facebook.com/winner
and of course mine : http://www.facebook.com/gillardg
nice compilation. I agree with the last comment. The sub 1000 fan pages will see the real facebook landrush.
I got facebook.com/PokerGames
“If you want to become the top social media consultant in the world, having a username like “socialmedia” is a pretty good place to start.”
You know, statements like that what’s so damn annoying about social media consultants. Most of them are about clichés, shortcuts, and tricks that look like the accomplished something, but mean nothing. They’re the “SEO experts” of Web 2.0
@Michael Bauser (who’s name currently says “Facebook User”), I posted that as a joke …
Facesquatting? Really? Good one.
Interestingly enough, http://www.facebook.com/default.aspx is not accessable, but http://www.facebook.com/defaultaspx is. The same goes for *.html (*html, now) and *.htm
For those who don’t know, the period is optional in the name, even if you registered it with it there you can access the page without it.
Did Facebook nix a bunch of user names of people who tried to be clever using normal web file extensions?
I LOVE THE TERM FACESQUATTING.
I might have to go claim facebook.com/facesquatting - it’s still available.
Not to be overly serious about it, but it really does kind of suck to have a friend do that to you. Sure “let’s laugh in life” but it would be a lot more funny if the url could be changed in the future, which it cannot. Even if there was a limit on url changes such as regional changes, it still offers some flexibility. So one person gets screwed out of their own name as a joke (it’s another matter in the case of common names), and the other is stuck with a joke of a url which they can’t change ever. I had a very obscure, odd myspace URL nickname and I got so sick of it that this time around I snagged my real name as soon as I could. I also, as far as I can tell, have my only name on the face of this earth (for now anyway,) so it would have been particularly annoying to have someone else snag it as a joke (not to mention my paranoia about what they would do with that name.)
Anyway, this is one thing that Myspace should get to lay permanent claim to publicity wise. They always had custom urls (at least when I first signed on in August of 2005, they did.)
Ahh, Midnight, the Witching Hour…
My friend Kyle decided it would be cool to register the username ‘Armageddon’ (keep in mind he had been drinking and watching the movie ‘Armageddon’).
Well, poor Kyle misspelled the word and wound up with ‘Armegeddon’ (I think that was his misspelling).
Drinking + Facebook Profile Username for Life = FAIL
I was surprised to learn that, within an hour or so of the opening of the gates, both ” /davidorr ” and “/david.orr ” were already taken. More surprised to learn that BOTH were tkaen by the same person, apparently an employee of Apple in Columbus Ohio. How can one person have taken two different usernames? The rules say only one. Is there something fishy going on here?
I clicked on http://www.facebook.com/getonit (listed above by Georges Gillard) and was taken to my FB home page instead. Does this indicate that FB cancelled that person’s username for some reason, or that that person deleted his/her account?
David:
I noticed that it still seems to default to someone’s privacy settings. I have a friend who I can reach through the new URL, but I can’t reach him through my OTHER “phantom” page I set up for myself and keep invisible to others. This “phantom” me is not his friend, and I know he keeps his privacy settings pretty high.
It also seems if you’re completely logged out of Facebook, you can’t see ANY, so they’re useless for showing “outsiders” your page unless they are members too. Which makes me question how useful personal urls are going to ultimately be.
My friends and I got a few:
facebook.com/invite
facebook.com/invitation
facebook.com/invitaciones
We are creating a invitation site which works with facebooks app and facebook connect, also with the iphone. Any investors out there? The site is called http://www.invitar.com
http://www.facebook.com/wordpress.org
lol
i thought this was hilarious, so i wrote a story about it.
http://www.halogenlife.com/articles/2564-face-squatting-the-new-era-of-facebook