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Comment by nextparadigms | Hacker News Reader

By the way, what's with the fugly Google+ URL's? Don't you agree they should make the URL's a lot nicer? There is no vanity URL either, which I'm sure quite a lot of people would like. Google has never seemed to get this. You should look at Google Sites url's. It's like 5 words in there before you even see your site's name. I wish they made them a bit more elegant and streamlined.

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Google+ is likely built with GWT, which requires more effort than say Rails to get nice URLs. My guess is that nice URLs are in the pipeline, but they weren't an initial priority.

Interestingly, the old Google Profiles did do this, my URL was https://profiles.google.com/corin.c.cole

I would imagine it will come to plus some time in the near future.

They probably turned it off for privacy. If you found an old Google profile URL, then you also knew the email address at Gmail, which would render Gmail useless for people who value their privacy.

Ideally, they need to offer the option to have a URL that is different from the Gmail address.

But in terms of code it's very easy to change the system so that it lets users pick their URL - the question is more whether Google will decide to do it, and the fact that they used vanity URLs in the old profiles suggests they may well.

I hope they do something on the namespacing.

Linkedin appear to be including a country name in the URL now which increases namespacing, but that isn't enough.

This is one of the biggest challenges I see online and in gaming at the moment:

How do you namespace identity in a way that gives everyone an appropriate vanity URL and scales indefinitely?

Currently every system seems to end up like XBL with '{{!! MyNAMEz !!}}'.

If XBL is like this now - what will it be like in 10 years.

I think I saw some planned Google Apps profile URLs somewhere that used the format /yourdomain/name - that could be a start.

Perhaps people could specify their own custom namespace.

agreed, totally and utterly. human readable urls are such a "tend" accepted wisdom, that i find it hard to believe it wouldn't be implemented

I've started questioning their importance. For some apps it's really difficult to get them done and the impact is not that great because people are mostly traversing link trees nowadays and most times simply use google to get somewhere... Twitter shortens even nice urls, so why bother?

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