The Future of Facebook Usernames | Hacker News Reader

The Future of Facebook Usernames

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When I cover the inevitable "Facebook Usernames Debacle," I'll be sure to mention repeatedly that you can buy your own domain. Thanks for the reminder Anil.

And yes, this post is pretty much prophetic.

Prophetic, maybe, but it's all pretty obvious if you've spent much time on the Internet.

Agreed. Plus, given that Facebook is a pretty standard platform at this point, it's not unreasonable to think of facebook.com as a sort of prefix-TLD. Sure, I can go buy a domain, but if all I'd put there is a personal website then a FU seems simpler. And if I want to protect my name/brand, then I am probably interested in every such domain-like address I can own, rather than just one.

A bit off topic: FU doesn't seem quite the acronym Facebook would want in general usage. Or perhaps they have figured it would work great on younger population...

Owning a domain name sounds like the best choice for one's online identity, but realistically it's not the best choice for about 198 million out of the 200 million people who use Facebook.

First of all, for many people, the only online presence they have is their Facebook account. Why would they buy a domain name? So that they can point it to their Facebook profile?

Secondly, owning a domain costs money and requires work to maintain (a lot of work if you are not tech-savvy). I'd guess a very small percentage of Facebook users would be willing to pay $10/year to use the site. So why would someone expect them to pay $10/year for a domain name?

Finally, what's to say that a facebook vanity URL is not a better choice than a domain name? Musicians often advertise using their myspace URL because it's easy to remember than a domain - you only have to remember a single word. It's entirely possible, depending on the success of Facebook, for people to be asking each other in 5 years, "what's your facebook address?" as it's easier than the current method of searching Facebook by name and sifting through 100 people with that name

the only problem with this piece is, I have yet to find the mythical "real domain that you can own". I've leased/rented/licensed/used quite a few domains over the years, but they each come with some sort of expiration and a threat that someone else can take the name if I don't pay up.

..and the "Facebook Username Debacle" won't help solve that problem either....

I have yet to find the mythical "real estate you can own" I've leased/rented and even taken out a mortgage on my condominium, but if I don't pay my condo fees every month, the association threatens to take my condo away... And if you don't pay taxes on any real estate, house, condo, or land?...

Yeah, I hate the idea of having to pay each year for my domain names. It sucks, it feels like we pay too much, but it is probably cheaper than if you could pay once up front and never have to pay any infrastructure costs. Imaging the hording and domain name market under those conditions.

So since I can't do anything about it, and I want those domain names, I chalk it off to infrastructure costs.

People have proposed solutions to this problem, like if you own a domain but stop paying the maintenance fees it will disappear from the DNS (so you can't use it), but will still appear in WHOIS and you'll still have legal title to it forever.

Ultimately it's political: Some people believe that domains should be property, some believe they shouldn't be, and everyone has trouble understanding the opposing viewpoint.

That is not a solution at all. What if somebody actually wants to use the domain? The solution proposed will actually increase domain squatting since there is no cost involved!

The only problem with domains right now is that it atleast the .com TLD is controlled by a monopoly and you have price increases. We need to have several companies who can issue .com domains

I thought Anil's piece was hilarious. However, I think he and others have missed out on the significance of the 'URL on facebook' as opposed to the 'real domain that you can own'.

The reason that people are excited it about it is because it's starting from scratch. That is, I may actually have the chance to get a username like 'scott' or 'sdt' rather than scott-siliconvalley94043. Since facebook is already a fairly canonical place to go for personal contact info, interests, etc, this is fairly huge.

The other important bit is that because facebook is a fairly canonical reference point, and it has very good search rankings, having your name established is going to be important. If some random 6th cousin of mine got the facebook.com/my.full.name and started ranking higher than my personal site for googling "my full name", I'd be pretty pissed. Of course, nobody really knows how Google is going to treat these vanity URLs.

All that's missing on the timeline (probably on Saturday morning, around lunch) is a blog post by Jason Calacanis about how he wants to buy the username from whoever got facebook.com/jason.

Thank you, I now feel that I can spend my weekend outdoors instead of sitting at home watching all this unfold. Other than a few minutes around 12:01, that is ;)

If by "a few minutes" you mean 35, then sure. And I'll probably be doing the same thing

I don't want it for the SEO, but if nothing else having the name is convenient for telling new "friends" how to find me on the most ubiquitous social network without having to email them a long profile URL.

I don't directly care about the SEO, but I'd rather not have some random guy with a beer belly and pictures of his last wild party to come up when people search for me. If I don't grab the name, somebody will.

As soon as I get a friendly Facebook URL for my blog I'm going to paste such a scathing response...

What about the first post for someone selling their username on eBay?

From Facebook TOS Section 4.7 (5/1/2009)

  You will not transfer your account to anyone without first getting our written permission.

http://www.facebook.com/terms.php

Good luck with that.

Yeah, because ebay checks that.

Amusing and quite well done, I thought. He did a good job capturing several internet memes. But the part that made me laugh the most was the throwaway line:

and everyone else considers reading the short bit.ly URL to be equivalent to reading the post.

I wonder if I'll be able to go on that update site and do it from my iPhone? Around that time, I will be at a bar, either celebrating my team winning Stanley Cup or drinking away my sorrows.. so no way to get to the actual computer.

Brilliant, I feel that HN will now disregard each of the various blog posts that will discuss these issues at length as they occur.

http://post.thing.net/node/2733

Funny and true. Going through the motions in the boring world of Web 2.0.

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