To Facebook launched its vanity URL service at 12am EST on Friday. As expected millions have grabbed the long wanted vanity URL. If you have a Facebook account you should seriously consider getting your custom URL before someone steals it from you.
There is however some potential bugs or perhaps it was done by design.
The bug in question is this; Multiple URLs for one Facebook account. Facebook allows you to create a custom URL with the following options ([A-Z], [0-9], – and .). So lets say you are called John Smith, you wish your URL to be http://www.facebook.com/johnsmith or you might want a separator using the dash or period for John.Smith The problem is JohnSmith is exactly the same as John.Smith and J-o-h-n-s-m-i-t-h. Just to show you this in action here is my vanity URL for my Facebook Profile. www.facebook.com/brendanwill and the edited one with a period in it http://www.facebook.com/brendan..will.
Now doesn’t seem like a big deal and wont be for most. However anyone who might try to get a Facebook page to rank in search terms for competitive terms could suffer from duplicate content syndrome. The search engines will have to pick which one to display and index in the search results. Which may just dilute down your hard work getting your Facebook page to rank well.
There is a benefit to this bug however it makes it harder for someone to get variation of your business/public figure name. Talking of names it would appear that Facebook didn’t think about making .aspx a reserved keyword as user Christine Shipley got herself the URL http://www.facebook.com/Default.aspx as reported on www.techcrunch.com
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June 13th, 2009 at 11:17 pm
Forgot to mention you can sign up for yours at http://www.facebook.com/username
If you have a business listing the date for getting your Facebook URL is the 28th of June 2009. I shall send a reminder for those on my mailing list just in case you forget.