Victory is mine!
For the past week facebook, and we geeks, have been counting down to the release of facebook user names! I know, I know; what’s the big deal? I’ve got user names on other sites like my twitter account; @pandapoo for example, but facebook uses real names so why do facebook user names matter so much? Well like it or not, for most of us facebook is our ‘home on the web’ and it’s an important part of both social and casual-business networking too. The problem for a long time has been the question of how to give out your facebook URL; do you give out the whole thing; numbers and all? Create a tinyurl or just don’t give it out at all? I often opted for the latter. I’m lucky in having an uncommon name; ‘Georgie Hammerton’ shows up just me on facebook so I stuck with letting people find me by name, but what about ‘John Smith’; how are his friends meant to find him? The answer is a username!
From 5:01AM (GMT) this morning we were able to jump on facebook.com/username and register the user name of our choice, in the first 3 minutes 200,000 user names were registered. And I, Georgie Hammerton, fastest fingers in the west, was up at 4:30am, counting down with my fellows on twitter, and at 5:01AM managed to snag facebook.com/georgie I’m a very proud man. My girlfriend, with whom I’m on holiday with at the moment, was not as impressed when I woke her up to ask if she wanted to get her username after some persuasion she managed ‘cat.bebb’ and is a happy lady (not as happy as me with ‘georgie’ *grin*.
I briefly spoke to the guy who got facebook.com/usernames, after a tip from Eddie, but he wasn’t happy 5 minutes later when facebook had decided to make that URL redirect to facebook.com/username, he’s stuck with his own name now; so old fashioned.
If you got yours already then please share them in the comments and if you haven’t then GET A MOVE ON!
I can finally say good-bye to http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=272701731, and hello to facebook.com/georgie hmm.. time to order some new contact cards me thinks!
Ciao!
I don’t usually do ‘personal’ posts but hey, this is just too cute not to share and I promise not to start blogging about my cats any time soon.