Facebook’s ‘Top Friends’ when it comes to vanity urls

Facebook fanatics are counting the minutes to the vanity url landrush, except for a few elite Facebook friends.

Facebook used to be a place for college kids to connect, post photos, and distract themselves from studying. Rather than swinging by a dorm room to write on the whiteboard on a friend’s door, the higher ed set could sign on to Facebook and write on a friend’s digital wall.

Facebook has evolved though. It’s now a behemoth of a social networking site, not just for the college set anymore. If you’re not on it, you better get on it soon. Because if you’re not on Facebook, you basically don’t exist. Or at least don’t get invited to your friend’s parties.

Facebook helps users craft an online identity. I regularly check out new acquaintances, colleagues, and potential love connections on the site. Those who I only know by e-mail address suddenly acquire a full-fledged identity (and face) thanks to Facebook (depending on their privacy settings).

Tonight, Facebook takes the personal identity shaping to a new level. You can claim your vanity url starting at 12:01 a.m. this evening.  Facebook designer Blaise DiPersia (who is an old college friend, but who has not friended me on Facebook) writes on the Facebook blog:

Your new Facebook URL is like your personal destination, or home, on the Web. People can enter a Facebook username as a search term on Facebook or a popular search engine like Google, for example, which will make it much easier for people to find friends with common names. Your username will have the same privacy setting as your profile name in Search, and you can always edit your search privacy settings here.

Starting at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday, June 13, you’ll be able to choose a username on a first-come, first-serve basis for your profile and the Facebook Pages that you administer by visiting www.facebook.com/username/. You’ll also see a notice on your home page with instructions for obtaining your username at that time.

Everyone is predicting a land rush to claim those vanity urls, but some get to ride their digital wagons in a little earlier than others. After the jump, find out who got to stake their territory early.

– Facebook employees already have their vanity urls in place. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed www.facebook.com/mark. And if your name is also Blaise DiPersia, you’re going to have to add a middle initial or something.

–If you have a trademark, you can claim your url early, says the National Law Journal. Here’s the link. Starbucks and H&M already have their pages in place.

– If you’re a special friend of the company, like a journalist from whom they hope to get favorable coverage, you got a special invite to claim your url. Congratulations (and thanks for the tip), Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington. Poynter reports that the Huffington Post and the New York Times have also claimed their urls.

For the rest of us hoi polloi, we’ll have to spend our Friday nights in.

Douglas Rushkoff at the Daily Beast is convinced this whole thing is a “fatal error.”

Facebook must be hoping the name change will not only make the site more user friendly, but also get people to start thinking of their Facebook pages as their public faces for both personal and business activities: true home pages.

That’s a problem. Facebook’s relative detachment from the Internet is not a bug, but a feature. Its only competitive advantage in the Internet space—its only reason for being—was that it was more personal, more closed off, and arguably more private than the Internet itself. Even then, the biggest problem has never been how to get people to find you, but how to not friend many of those who do. Now that we’ll be quickly findable via Google, what’s left to distinguish this social-networking site from the social network that is… the Internet?

via Facebook’s Fatal Error – Page 1 – The Daily Beast.

Doug, that’s why privacy settings exist. The only fatal error would be not claiming your piece of Facebook land tonight at 12:01 a.m.