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.
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Facebook has decided to let companies file their trademarks to prevent other users from registering a username that they have rights to. This has been an issue that many Twitter users have seen and the company has found it difficult to manage since they respond to trademark disputes on a case by case basis. Facebook is taking a different approach by letting users fill out a username prevention form. Businesses must have a “registration number” but I’m not sure what number Facebook is looking for.
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As Facebook searches for ways to increase their revenue, some users are being asked if they are willing to pay for vanity URLs. For those unaware of what vanity URLs are, they are the short strings that follow “facebook.com”. For example, the AllFacebook.com public profile has a short URL which is “http://www.facebook.com/allfacebook”. A number of celebrities and high profile individuals have been granted profile URLs for free as a way to encourage them to update their Facebook public profiles more regularly.
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