This weekend saw a massive land rush in people signing up for their vanity URL at Facebook. One hour after Facebook opened for vanity URL’s on Saturday at 16:01 NZ time, 1 million users had registered their vanity URL. That’s a lot of people, especially when you keep in mind that this was bed time for much of Europe and USA!!

A vanity URL is a personal Internet address that is shortened and personalised so that other people can easier find you on a website.

For Facebook your profile page address has up till this weekend looked like this :

www.facebook.com/index.php?lh=82e25be80fc1540e354324f08fc35574&

instead of now

www.facebook.com/espeng

If you haven’t registered your vanity URL yet you can do it now at www.facebook.com/username

Other social networks like MySpace has had this for years and Facebook has gotten a lot of criticism for not having it. So when they finally decided to open up for it the anticipation was huge around who would get their ideal username. Especially because the name is given on a first come-first serve basis, you can only choose your username once, and you can not change it. So for a lot of companies, artists and groups this was their only chance to get their ideal username or brand name.

Facebook had a counter counting down the days and hours until the launch.

And when they finally launched on Saturday -what a fight it was! I was ready on the dot and I had hoped for the username espen but 20 seconds into it that was already taken. Some other Espen from Norway snapped it away from me. So I ended up with espeng instead, not quite so glamorous.

facebook.com/kiwibank
More interesting is it that I have another test account with Facebook. Its something I have used for building Facebook applications and a vanity URL doesn’t have much point on that account. But I might as well register something so today, Sunday, nearly 24 hours later, I decided to try registering a brand name. Its a good way to investigate how Facebook look at company brands and how the process it for the brand owner to get it back. So I started with the top 100 global brands at Milward Brown. Not surprisingly I found that every one was taken.

My thoughts then went on to NZ brands; airnz, theherald, trademe… taken, taken, taken. But then, after trying a few bank brands I found that kiwibank was available!
Kiwibank, who I must say is my favourite bank – they are innovative, good service, low loan rates, and very active on the web. But somehow someone at Kiwibank must not have been doing their job properly because there it was: “kiwibank is available, do you want to register it now?”. I clicked Yes.

So now it remains to see how long it takes before Kiwibank notices and tries to reclaim it.
Most likely this will be an easy process. Facebook has promised to react quickly to breaches of TradeMarks agreements and there is already a submission form available for re-claiming registered brands. If not, there is nothing I can do about it now because according to Facebook I can’t transfer it, change it or remove it…