In case you missed it, Facebook opened up ‘vanity’ URLs this weekend. What’s a vanity URL? Simple really. It’s a web address that features your name or internet handle – in terms of Facebook, it ends up being www.Facebook.com/YourName. Vanity URLs are considered prestigious, may have some SEO benefits, and are the internet version of Kilroy Wuz Here. In terms of ‘branding’ it equates to staking out turf on the social media landscape. When it comes to Facebook vanity URLs, there are some restrictions on company, group and fan pages but personal names are pretty well open season.
When the URLs became available early Saturday morning, there was the predictable gold-rush as people logged on to Facebook, trying to snatch up addresses that matched their user name (if you haven’t done so, you should go there now). Anyhoo, I missed my personal page by a couple of minutes and have to make do with placing the number one after my name. Not a big deal, my personal page is, well, personal and any business dealings are conducted under The Logo Factory fan and group pages. But what it your name is important? That’s a different kettle of digital fish.
Take graphic designer David Airey for example. David’s a dear friend of mine from Northern Ireland (my home country) who has carved out quite a name for himself in the design industry via his personal website and his Logo Design Love blog. David’s a great guy, has earned a great deal of respect from designers of all levels and is as accessible as anyone I know in this business (David even helped out my daughter with a college project recently). Anyhoo, it would be really decent if, when you were looking for David on Facebook, you could simple type in www.facebook.com/davidairey and it would take you to his Facebook page. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. It doesn’t even take you to another David Airey, which wouldn’t be so bad (I lost out to another Steve Douglas who beat me to the punch. In many ways I was lucky to get www.facebook.com/stevedouglas1). Nope. The davidairey URL takes you to a page belonging to someone called Bennu Constance, someone claiming to be a woman, and someone claiming to be located in Alberta Canada. Highly unlikely there’s a legitimate reason that Ms. Constance snatched up the David Airey vanity URL and it’s probably someone hoovering David’s online reputation, setting up the page for some spam scheme or worse – to hold Airey’s name ransom knowing a) it’s important to David and b) because of David’s online activities, it’s valuable to him.
Not so far fetched – there are already bottom-feeding ‘companies’ that are squatting on prime Twitter, Facebook and Gmail account names and well sell them to anyone, for a hefty price. Assetize, one such outfit, features account names from Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Wordpress, Blogger and Yahoo Groups. One of the ‘auctions’ on their home page features a Facebook vanity URL for $20,000. Not much the social media platforms can do about it I suppose (though I suspect trademark registration is a decent trump card), but it’s yet another example of what happens when people conduct themselves according to what they ‘can’ do, as opposed to what they ’should’ do.
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Tags: business, social media, web
That’s very gracious of you, Steve. I never knew there were sites like Assetize that take it squatting sales to an extreme with Gmail, Facebook and Twitter profiles. What a crock (to put it politely). Here’s hoping this “Benu” woman / man / robot leaves mine at Facebook. Could be some automated process, because not only did the same person take “davidairey”, they took “david.airey” too (there was me thinking you could only have one going to the same account).
David Airey’s last blog post..Northern Ireland’s designer twits
@ David – Crock is right. Pisses me off when idiots take advantage of other people’s legitimate efforts. In my case there wasn’t any nefarious intentions – simply a matter of another Steve Douglas being faster on the draw than I was (to be honest, I fell asleep watching the telly). In your case, it’s completely different, especially if the person also snagged david.airey as well. I think we’re going to hear a lot of complaints if Facebook allows this kind of thing to go unchecked.
It does seem that every new URL-based system is open to just this sort of squatting. I think in the case of Facebook URLs the dot makes no difference – much like with Gmail differences firstnamelastname is the same as firstname.lastname hence both the David Airey options being taken. I think it’s a variation of this sort of thing that has driven the Twitter ‘verified accounts’ system – but yeah, it’s a crock.
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@ Ben – thanks for dropping by. I was initially opposed to the idea, but I guess I’m starting to like the introduction of a ‘verified account’ system.
wow… to think that someone would stoop that low is completely ridiculous! And most likely there is nothing that David will be able to do. Don’t expect Zuckerberg to do anything unless you have your name copyrighted and actually feel like going through the wringer to “attempt” to claim rights to it. Unlikely, and completely unfortunate!
Like you Steve, I too have a very common first/last name combo also, and jon allen, jonathan allen, jonathan, and jon, were already gone by the time i got my first keystroke in (which could easily have been taken by one of the facebook employees that had first dibs on any and every vanity url ahead of the general public). I ended up just throwing my middle initial in there, and to take away some of the clutter, i just tell people its facebook.com/jonathan.a.allen (same as jonathanaallen… with or without the decimals, it takes you to the same page). Squatters suck… no way around it, and normally when it comes to domains, i figure, well its fair and square that i didnt think of buying it first. But when you’re talking about someone first and last name, you’re stepping over the line in terms of being able to affect the person’s reputation, and that is going too far.
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@ Jonathan – welcome. I like your solution. I wish I had have grabbed steve.douglas or another available option (when I realized I had lost my name, I snapped at the first variant I saw). Unfortunately, I’m one of the rare souls who doesn’t have a middle name so it wouldn’t work for me. Guess I could have gone with the full spelling name of my first name – Stephen – but due to getting incessantly razzed as ‘Stephanie’ when I was a kid, I’ve never used it.
Thanks for welcoming me to your site. I think all in all, facebook is huge, and if used properly, i suppose it could bring in some extra “attention” to one’s website or blog… but after i thought about losing out on my first/last name vanity url, it really doesn’t seem as thought im missing anything. Honestly, i have never typed anyones old facebook url into a browser in my life. And im on facebook daily. Simply put, i sign in, and do a basic search for anyone im looking for. I mean, really, the vanity urls dont seem to add anything special to the facebook experience to me. Except when i create a “contact me on facebook” link on one of my sites, i have the convenience of not writing a bunch of numbers into the url. Of course now that there is a such thing as having a vanity url, tons of people will use them. There’s no doubt there, but i dont see that we are at an uber significant advantage having them. Maybe im wrong and jumping the gun on this one. But generally, if you are on someones website and they have a link to their facebook page, it really doesnt matter what their vanity url is once a visitor makes a friend/fan request. And speaking of fan requests… i can’t even make a vanity url for my sites because i dont have 1000 fans. Ummm hello, what gives? I guess bottom line is that for some, it could prove useful, but for me, facebook was fine without the “myspace-esque” username thing. If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.
on another note, whats your twitter, Steve? I’d like to follow if you have one.
@ Johathan – you can find me here http://twitter.com/TheLogoFactory I have a personal account safely socked away but I haven’t used just yet.
Yes, this whole thing sucks. I probably wouldn’t have had a problem getting my name, but it’s too long.
I went for a shorter version (6 letters) instead.
Molly Wood from CNET had her name swiped as well. http://twitter.com/mollywood/status/2170805747
Oh, and “Assetize” is a bad choice of name…
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I was fortunate enough to be able to snap up “anlina” for my vanity url, probably because it’s such an unusual name. I was worried another Anlina might get it (or the Russian watch company that owns anlina.com might grab it), but it never even occurred to me that someone might grab it up just to squat (I guess also because I was under the impression that they were permanent and unchangeable.)
I’d feel really quite violated if anlina had been taken and someone had grabbed anlinasheng. It’s one thing to have someone with the same name as you to beat you to the punch, but to have someone take it just so you can’t have it…
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