But before vanity url’s were even available I had a subdomain pointing to my facebook page: facebook.ricardobueno.com.

It’s great branding and much cleaner than that long numbered url.

Yes I think it’s cool that Facebook opened up vanity urls. But if they hadn’t, I’d still have my subdomain pointing right where I want it.

However, I badly wanted “srinivas”, FB said it was not available. But, http://www.facebook.com/srinivas is still not working.

I could not create the user name via Chrome, did anyone else see similar issues ?

@coxy: that reminds me a bit of sweetcron.

My favorite part: “Coincidentally, 220,000 unemployed professionals will realize to their horror that their Facebook profile now ranks above their LinkedIn profile if a prospective employer googles them…”

I’ve had pretty good success at owning most of the first page on the SERPs for my name (I was pleased to see that I owned the entire page on BING). Going with the flow with something like “FU” is almost forced participation if one wants to play the SEO game… which can be oodles of fun.

(Still, I’m always kinda confused by people putting social network profiles on business cards. They shouldn’t depend on the good behavior of somebody else’s URI structure. If you really want a social network profile to your main point of contact, at least register a personal domain and redirect it to the profile. That way, you’re not too screwed if Facebook changes their URIs, goes out of business, or does something else weird.)

JT: I suspect it’s less about e-mail and more about duplicating Twitter’s @reply functionality.

Facebook is clearly trying to muscle in on Twitter’s turf as a cross-platform (web, desktop, mobile) status/messaging tool. If you think about, @replies are one of Twitter’s few big advantages right now:

1)They allow you to post a message to a friend without going to that friend’s profile page.

2) They allow you send one post to multiple friends.

3) They allow you to add an easy link to a third party within a post.

Facebook can’t really copy those features until users have human-memorizable unique identifiers. I won’t be at all surprised if Facebook adds an @reply syntax to its SMS and web interfaces, using the new usernames.

For businesses, I think it just looks more buttoned up. And as often as people cross-link from one site to another, cosmetically it looks better.

Further, Myspace has had this functionality for a long time.

Verdict: Useful for some.

By a domain and change the CNAME records and you can have all your ‘stuff’ from other social network aggregated to your Virb page, along with any new content you exclusively create on Virb.

They’re testing it right now, as I type this, see: http://thisisthematt.com/