What’s in a name? Facebook Username Land Grab Gets Underway.

Who hasn’t heard of Google food at this stage of the game? The web is one big, juicy, vivacious selection of it. Some things aren’t as appetizing. A one year old news article, for instance, may have been the Soup De Jour on a Monday night, but it has since been tucked away in the back pages of the menu. Something like your Twitter account would probably be that tasty order of fried calamari… delicious, yet a mere taste of delight that one orders to hold them over for the entree. Facebook vanity URL? That, my friends, is a steaming heap of succulent, melt-in-your-mouth Kobe Prime Rib to our neighborhood search engines.

When I caught wind of the fact that Facebook was going to start offering vanity URLs, I knew that my Friday night was going to be spent right in front of my computer. As soon as the clock struck midnight, I quickly grabbed the name I wanted.

Earlier today, at a manager’s meeting for my company, I told everyone about this event. Afterward, I was innundated with the same question: Why is this important??

As some of you may or may not know, I have developed a web-nemesis of sorts. He shares my name, and when you google it, HIS Twitter account shows up above a couple of my results. Why? Because the URL to find him on Twitter is twitter.com/zaneburnett. So, to me, it was not a question of whether or not I was going to get this, but rather a question of when. In case you’re wondering, it was Saturday, 13 June 2009 at 12:01:01. I was one of an estimated 500,000 users who grabbed their vanity URL within the first 15 minutes.

For Realtors, you now have the opportunity to tell your clients to look you up on Facebook in a very simple manner… provided someone else didn’t get your name first. More importantly, if the URL you chose matches your first and last name, it’s almost a given that you will now gain one more spot on the first page of Google.