Facebook Username Landrush…subdomains are sexy again!

Lots of people waited for 12:01 last night for the chance to grab their facebook.com/username vanity url. In fact Mashable.com reported that over 200,000 vanity urls were grabbed in 3 mins and over 500,000 in 15 mins. So what is, was the big deal anyway?

Facebook’s Spin

Well this was how Facebook explained..er..spun it . “From the beginning of Facebook, people have used their real names to share and connect with the people they know. This authenticity helps to create a trusted environment because you know the identity of the people and things on Facebook. The one place, though, where your identity wasn’t reflected was in the Web address for your profile or the Facebook Pages you administer. The URL was just a randomly assigned number like “id=592952074.” That soon will change.

We’re planning to offer Facebook usernames to make it easier for people to find and connect with you. When your friends, family members or co-workers visit your profile or Pages on Facebook, they will be able to enter your username as part of the URL in their browser. This way people will have an easy-to-remember way to find you. We expect to offer even more ways to use your Facebook username in the future.”

Subdomains become sexy again

An excellent spin job for what really is just a subdomain to be used primarily for marketing purposes. Albeit a subdomain by the world’s largest social networking site right now. So the hype spread online like a California wildfire. I caught the bug and grabbed mine www.facebook.com/ingridriley and will do so for my fan pages too of course. But I just thought that all this is sorta kinda ironic. I remember when subdomains like facebook.com/brandname were considered 2nd class to the actual domain www.brandname.com, especially in the age of first wave web development, when many service providers would give their clients subdomains www.webdevinc.com/clientname and in some respects not even bothering to register a unique domain name.

Now they’re called vanity urls and a great marketing opportunity because it happens to be Facebook, the social networking site with 200 million people – the place where people go to connect and reconnect, the place where brands go to build relationships with existing and new customers. In essence, a marketer’s wet dream.