So, yesterday Facebook finally gave users the ability to choose a vanity url for their profile, no longer do you need to remember facebook.com/profile.php?id=1234567890 instead you get to pick a username and have facebook.com/myusername, just like every single other social networking tool in existence. They give you a set of default alternatives to pick, things like dean.robinson or deanrobinson etc, or you can choose you own, I chose deanjrobinson. They also say once you’ve picked it you can’t change it, which I guess is fair. What is odd though is that facebook.com/deanjrobinson is the same as facebook.com/dean.j.robinson is the same as facebook.com/dea.njrob.inson is the same as facebook.com/d.e.a.n.j.r.o.b.i.n.s.o.n etc etc… So the question is, what’s the point in giving users the option to include a period/full stop in their ‘username’ if it just gets ignored anyway, seems like an unnecessary level of confusion to me.
Had just this conversation with people on Twitter/Jaiku yesterday. Being that those of us on GMT time got screwed with the username ‘landrush’ starting at 5am I missed my chance to get facebook.com/alexleonard and of course tried to get alex.leonard but discovered what you did.
Why bother? Why not just say only characters and numbers? Or alternatively, make full stops count as per gmail, and why no underscores or dashes?
I’ve had to go with /alexanderleonard which isn’t ideal, but unfortunately my parents, in their supreme wisdom chose to call me by my second name and so my middle initial is actually the name by which everyone knows me!
Agree about the time issue, it caused problems for a lot of people. We got a little lucky here in Australia (strange, because we usually get screwed) as the landrush started at 2pm on Saturday arfternoon, which was a great time. Even still the basic firstname.lastname combo, dean.robinson, was already taken, but that was fine because I didn’t actually want that anyway.