Last night I stayed up with about 500,000+ other Facebook users waiting for the clock to strike Midnight on the U.S. east coast. It was then that the Facebook servers went live and allowed us to register our preferred vanity URL for our accounts all within about three minutes. A lot of very valuable Internet real estate flew out the door last night for no cost to the user. I got my share.
Before last night if you visited my Facebook page the URL was a string of random characters that even I never bothered to remember. Now you can just type in http://www.facebook.com/mikenally and there you go; my Facebook page. As if you needed another place to find my thoughts and ramblings right?
What struck me odd was the number of people I ran into on Twitter and even Facebook last night that thought the idea of a vanity URL was silly. ”Why bother?” seemed to be the common theme of those choosing not to participate in the Facebook frenzy.
I get why you may not be a fan of Facebook. I’m not exactly a huge Facebook user myself. But to not lock in your personal identifier on one of the most popular sites on the Internet seems incredibly short sighted to me.
If you want to find me on the Internet I’m quickly becoming the MikeNally. There are more than a few other folks in this world with that name but I’ve worked hard to lock in my version of it in as many places as possible. You can find me here, of course, at MikeNally.com but I’m also Twitter.com/MikeNally, Friendfeed.com/MikeNally, and now Facebook.com/MikeNally along with a few other sites as well. It’s simple, consistent, and as the Internet continues to grow, powerful.
If nothing else I own the name. How I use it is what makes it worth something of course. Who owns your name?
