A vanity URL is created to point to something to which it is related and indicated in the name of the URL. In many cases this is done by a company to point to a specific product or advertising campaign microsite. In theory, vanity URLs are creatively linked to something making them easier to remember than a more random link.
On the other hand, they’re becoming so big so fast too. Almost may social networks provide vanity URL’s for the users.. Checkout my twitter URL its twitter.com/thesharath. Not very long ago, google started Google profiles which also provides your own vanitly URL. For example: http://www.google.com/profiles/sharathgrao, plus you also get to customize what shows on the page and link it with your online identities (websites you are on)….
As of now, most public profiles on Facebook are of the form facebook.com/profile.php?id=<some_number> or facebook.com/people/{name}/<some_id> but starting Saturday or Friday night depending on your Time zone, Facebook has announced to give a username for all Facebook profiles. So the new Facebook URL will be something like facebook.com/<Your_Name>.
Why is this useful?
Your new Facebook URL is like your personal destination, or home, on the Web. People can enter a Facebook username as a search term on Facebook or a popular search engine like Google or yahoo for example, which will make it much easier for people to find friends with common names.
Really? i’m not looking for friends, i’m a business kinda person.. will this help me too?
Yup, it’ll help you for sure.. Here are few useful tips why you need one..
– Short, easy-to-remember and often looks good on your business cards.
– Instant traffic for your business website with a facebook URL linked to it
– Facebook has over 200 million users, so it’ll help you promote your business too
– Search engines would crawl your sites more faster (thinking you’re popular tooo)
– It looks cool – facebook.com/thesharath is much cooler than facebook.com/people/Sharath-G-Rao/567291353
Facebook usernames will be available in basic text forms, and you can only choose a single username for your profile and for each of the Pages that you administer. Your username must be at least five characters in length and only include alphanumeric characters (A-Z, 0-9), or a period or full stop (“.”). If you want one too then head to facebook.com/username
now…
Think carefully about the username you choose. Once it’s been selected, you won’t be able to change or transfer it. If you signed up for a Facebook Page after May 31 or a user profile after today at 3 p.m. EDT, you may not be able to sign up for a username immediately to prevent abuse or “squatting” on names.
I just got mine now … see facebook.com/thesharath :) cool eh?
