The whole world A small number of super-geeky obsessives is abuzz over the upcoming launch of Facebook Usernames, an exciting new feature that will let you put some parts of your name into a web address.
June 13, 12:01am: Facebook launches Facebook Usernames. The gold rush is on!
June 13, 12:01:45am: The first completely irrational, highly unlikely theory about how Google indexes Facebook Usernames is emitted from the ass-end of the SEO industry.
June 13, 12:02am: An enterprising and mischevious nerd who is definitely not me squats on the username of a notable tech trade reporter like Michael Arrington.
June 13, 12:06am: The Facebook username system starts getting overloaded with new registrations, but their tech team clears it up in 20 or 30 minutes, for a total period of slowness of about 35 minutes.
June 13, 12:15am: A first wave of "It's alive! Go get your name!" posts go up on various technology blogs, noting that the service is running a little bit slow. None of these posts mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.
June 13, 12:45am: TechCrunch discovers that one of its writers can't get his preferred spelling for his name, and notices that registrations in the system are running a bit slow. A Twitter search reveals four other people discussing the same problems, and one person that can't get to the feature at all. The phrase "The Facebook Username debacle" is first used, and becomes the preferred sobriquet for the feature forevermore. 70% of commenters mention that "Facebook Username" can be abbreviated "FU", and each thinks he is the first to think of it.
June 13, 1:00am: #FUFacebook becomes a Trending Topic on Twitter. People who are presently whining about how expensive it is to buy a new iPhone because they bought a new iPhone last year will have the chance to see how obnoxious and overprivileged they look, but will not take the opportunity.
June 13, 9:00am: The first mainstream coverage of the feature happens in the New York Times, which includes a one-line mention of the launch in a lengthy feature about Twitter's Verified Accounts. The story includes a colorful illustration of Kanye West, but omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.
June 13, 12:01pm: Twelve hours after launch, a passionate and vitriol-filled flame war erupts amongst web protocol nazis about exacly which 300-series HTTP header should be used to redirect from the old /profile.php?id=500012896 URLs to the new system. Mark Pilgrim writes an overwrought essay on the topic, and 300 Ubuntu users on netbooks use their free hand to Digg the post. For these nerds, "The Facebook Debacle" refers to the improper headers used on the redirects, instead of the few minutes of difficulty in registering names.
June 13, 12:01pm: Within twelve hours of launch, the OpenID community will quietly reach out to Facebook, asking about their plans to have Facebook Usernames become an OpenID provider. Facebook will decline to comment, Simon Willison will write a thoughtful and persuasive essay about the benefits to Facebook if they were to embrace such a thing, and Andy Baio will politely link to it on Waxy Links. Months later, Facebook will actually implement the feature. For this community, this cordial and fruitful exchange will be referred to "The Facebook Debacle".
June 13, 3:00pm: I tweet a link to my post about owning your identity online. The few folks who read it seven years ago nod in agreement, and everyone else considers reading the short bit.ly URL to be equivalent to reading the post.
June 13, 4:04pm: A white guy named David discovers every variation of his name on Facebook is already taken, and finally reconsiders the condescending contempt he's always had for black people who give their kids unique names. This tiny bit of racial reconsideration is the only unequivocally good news to come out of the Facebook Usernames launch.
June 15, 8:00am: A short and punchy Monday morning story about Facebook Usernames appears on USA Today's website, omitting any mention of the word "debacle", but dwelling heavily on the preponderance of URLs with "Hussein" in them. This vestige of the Presidential elections, which briefly convinced college kids that changing their middle name on a website was a form of political activism, is promptly interpreted as an Al Qaeda sleeper cell movement by most of the paper's print readers.
June 15, 9:00am: In its opening weekend, between four and five million people (or between two and three percent of Facebook's ostensible population) will have registered Usernames for themselves. Tech pundits will say "everyone has a Facebook Username now" and refer to that assertion as an article of faith in future posts about identity. It will not be until 2012 that Facebook supports the full range of diacritical marks and international characters that let the other 5.5 billion residents of Earth use their name as a username, but this fact will go unreported.
June 15, 11:00am: In response to the growing buzz on TechMeme about "The Facebook Debacle", Mark Zuckerberg posts on Facebook's blog with the news that the company has created the Facebook Username Dispute Resolution Community. This group is tasked with creating a policy for arbitrating who can get what names, how conflicts between different people's usernames are resolved, and how to report squatting of usernames. The post omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook. Over the course of its 18-month existence, the FUDR Community will attract thousands of comments, 80% of which ask for The Old News Feed back, and 85% of which contain one or more typos or deviations from standard spellings of English words.
June 15, 1:00pm: LinkedIn posts a thinly-veiled but very smart update on their company blog that happens to mention in passing that they've had friendly usernames as an option for URLs for years, and that it's more likely you want to show your professional profile to the world as the first Google result for your name. The post omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on LinkedIn.
June 15, 1:30pm: The Google Profiles team will write a post that features a bad pun in the headline, ostensibly serving to announce some minor recent feature update, but in reality just trying to remind people that hey, you can get a Google URL. The post omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Google.
June 15, 2:00pm: An enterprising young web hacker will realize that there are 24 items in this list, which means that if you add in a free space, you can very easily turn this post into a 5×5 Facebook Username Bingo Card. Combined with the Creative Commons license on this blog, it makes for a fun idea and a Flickr Pool pops up for people to show the FU Bingo cards they've generated.
June 15, 4:00pm: The first web-savvy celebrity in Hollywood will hold a meeting with their marketing team about what it will take to get their preferred username. During this meeting, the smartest person in the room will try to explain the difference between a profile page and a fan page, why there are different processes for getting vanity URLs for each, and why a person or brand doesn't have control over all the fan pages that can be created about them. That person will be ignored by everyone else for the duration of the meeting. The issue will be ignored by Facebook for nearly a year.
June 16, 10:00pm: The Domai.nr guys release a service that lets you sign in with your Facebook Connect account and automatically find what variations of your name are available as real domain names. While the feature is cool and works well, the team struggles to get press coverage for the launch, since it's predicated on the idea that you can register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.
June 19, 9:00am: The Bureau of Labor Statistics will announce the unemployment numbers for May, showing a loss of 660,000 jobs, with 1/3 of them being white-collar jobs. Coincidentally, 220,000 unemployed professionals will realize to their horror that their Facebook profile now ranks above their LinkedIn profile if a prospective employer googles them, and that they have no idea how to use Facebook's privacy settings.
July 31, 2009: MySpace announces MyAddress, a feature for providing more control over the URL where your MySpace profile appears. Instead of constraining users to a few choices as Facebook does, MySpace gives users very broad control over what kind of address they can have. As a result, users pick web addresses that exactly match their obscure handles on the service, instead of using their real names.
February 15, 2010: Microsoft launches a similar URL service for usernames, providing friendly URLs for millions of people on Windows Live and XBox Live, and providing the feature to more people in one day than Facebook has succeeded in delivering usernames to in eight months. Because the announcement goes out on President's day, and because it's Microsoft, nobody really notices except for a two-line mention on Mashable, half of which is a joke about Bing. Both Microsoft's own announcement and the Mashable post omit any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Live.com.
October 31, 2010: AOL has an internal meeting about providing friendly URLs to users of AIM and Bebo, and make a bold decision to put it on their 18-month roadmap.
I hope you find this overview of the future timeline of Facebook Usernames useful to understand where this exciting feature is going in the future, how our industry will adapt and respond to this sort of innovation, and how our tech trade press will hold the powerful company's feet to the fire as this sort of capability becomes mainstream in the years to come.
And oh hey, add me as a friend on Facebook! Or become a fan of mine! Or something.
[this is fab]
well written Anil!
and your running punch line of:
"The post omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook. "
is heard and I do wonder is the value only if you have a strong branded domain name?
I mean, if I have facebook.com/bryanbrey
or
facebook.com/consciousrealestate.com
yet, neither one has brand power (yet) then does this apply?
can you explain this distinction you are beat boxing in bass?
thanks man.
bryan
I mean, this is freaking awesome. Just awesome.
By the way, I hate that my OpenID provider -- or OpenID itself -- identifies me here at "q.queso.com". I'm a person, not a URL! (And the amount of content at that URL is pathetic.)
From hence forth, you shall be known as Nostradashus
June 21, 2009: Mainstream news organizations begin requiring their reporters to create Facebook Usernames, in an attempt to gain credibility with younger readers.
Editors and publishers do not realize they can simply create reporter-specific pages on their own news Web sites.
Thank you for not calling it #FUFail. Let's keep the #*fail namespace open for real disasters.
There is a glitch in your dates for your time line:
June 13, 12:45am
June 12, 1:00am
June 13, 9:00am
if you mean username urls like this http://myspace.com/sirshannon then myspace has had this almost as long as I can remember.
Laffs!
Oh shit, good call, Adrian. I think the idea that newspapers will ask their reporters to get Facebook names should be the free space on the bingo card. We could also make a free spot for "company files frivolous lawsuit over alleged trademark infringement in Facebook Username URL."
Thanks to this comment, my primary goal for the night of the 13th is acquiring the username monster thereby ensuring that I can be the defendant of that first lawsuit.
Quick, somebody nickname me monster so I have a decent legal defense!
You wouldnt happen to have read my "Twitter's Future History", would you? :-)
http://is.gd/Y3Dr
-- MV
[this is good]
Anil, well played. But wait... you're telling me that I can get my own name in my domain? Yeah right.
Next thing, you'll be telling me I can get my own name in an e-mail address? As if.
I just received a private Facebook message from a friend - he sent his GMail address in the message and this is what it looked like in the e-mail private message notification from Facebook:
I think it's safe to assume that Facebook is adding usernames to keep pace with twitter. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out on the Facebook home feed.
[this is good]
This was awesome - great read. Let's see how many of these things turn out exactly like you predict.
Absolutely wonderful wonderful wonderful.
This is about 12 kinds of funny. Loved this: "Coincidentally, 220,000 unemployed professionals will realize to their horror that their Facebook profile now ranks above their LinkedIn profile if a prospective employer googles them, and that they have no idea how to use Facebook's privacy settings."
It's too real... I couldn't read past the first few paragraphs, had to go get my security blanket.
Fabulous read! Thank you!
Great stuff, Anil. Damn funny... and moreso because it's probably pretty spot on.
-Anil M. Jain
Slipstream Labs
www.slipstreamlabs.com
I don't see how you could get your name in a domain name Louis. Some guy already has that domain ;) Maybe you'll have to go for the .net or something
Hysterical article, but I have a question.
Although it's easy to get your name as a domain, it isn't integrated into the various online communities. So while I could get SallyJones.com, it's inherently different than pointing people to my Facebook page. And don't you think www.facebook.com/SallyJones looks nicer to click on than facebook.com/pages/127472309 ?
"...register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on..."
Legendary!!!
Too funny. What is the over/under on these dates and times?
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/10/facebook-vanity-urls-journalists-dont-have-to-wait-in-line/
Love it. Favorite post in a long time.
Very nice. You're good enough to be a real writer, not just a blogger.
I've had a facebook username for months...and a twitter one and many others...
rossrader.com/facebook
rossrader.com/twitter
so yeah, people are using domains, and Facebook will never acknowledge it :-)
/r
Nice?
Images of these things flooded into my head as soon as I saw the notice on facebook.
Great post.
Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. :)
Hahahah.. That was gold!
You forgot the part where thousands of "omgz, dont change facebook again!" groups start popping up as all your technophobe friends change their statuses to reflect their horror at Facebook. (Are they REALLY gonna start charging?!?!?)
[this is good]
"300 Ubuntu users on netbooks use their free hand to Digg the post" ROFL.
Yes, you're right... however if you set up a 401 redirect you could automatically redirect visitors who went to SallyJones.com/facebook to facebook.com/pages/127472309
It's what we implemented months ago for our company profile page on Facebook and apparently will have to continue doing as we have less than 1000 fans (though that's another story).
i loved this - thanks for the laughs. You cut to the bone quite beautifully :)
Brilliant! A really clever snapshot of today's geekery :)
Great article. I'll keep a bingo card on my desk on Saturday night as this all plays out.
[this is so good]
We'll get that Domainr/FBConnect integration pushed asap.
-E
Great article. The only sad thing is how true it is, is this what the world has become?
I rather fear it has...
I cannot wait until all of this stuff comes true. I just hope people don't realize they can get a real domain for their name using domai.nr instead of having just another URL on any site.
So you mean to tell me that URLs have something to do with SEO? Now that is brain shocking....
Funniest blog entry I've read in a long time!
Very nicely done :)
What would be interesting is if someone took this (maybe you Anil) and then highlighted each event as "DONE" as it actually happens in the future.
It would be interesting to see how accurate you were with the timings (because I am pretty sure all this will happen :P, it is just a question of when)
Thanks for this post. Enjoyed it :)
That was brilliantly hilarious at points, and then just scary at others. It felt way too real. And I'd just feel weirdly hypocritical now becoming a fan of yours or adding you on Facebook. Damn your brilliance.
June 13, 4:04pm-- Hahahahahah
Anil - Probably the funniest blog post I've read in ages... and parts of it are sadly all too accurate. Thanks for taking the time to write this! - Dan
HAHA, funniest blog post ever!
This has to be one of the best posts I have ever read. Kept me entertained the whole time.
FANGIRLING!
and, like, OMG! i can get a URL with name and like, stuff?!?!?
who knew!
June 17, 2009: FacebookNamr gets funded by the Facebook Fund to provide tools and services for the acquisition of Facebook Usernames, as well as a directory of such Usernames. The primary skillset of the FacebookNamr team is SEO and as a result the FacebookNamr directory becomes the second search result for any real name, immediately after the Facebook Username domain itself. The real URL you own is bumped from the fourth page of search results to the fifth page.
It is too bad that a 3rd party didn't setup something that would let you do this years ago so that you could use something like
http://profile.to/michaelkpate
to get to your account.
and what about the Free Hosting ad at the footer? Its time to get a domain really!
Article remarks: SIMPLY SUPERB!!
Facebook is evil and I will never join. I turned down a date with a girl last month because instead of her cell number, she wrote her facebook URL on a napkin and handed it to me.
Ha! I think it should be made into a checklist :P so you can mark off all of the predictions that come true.
Great job, Anil! Very entertaining read. Agree with other comments, you should check off what happened and when.
Kind of pathetic how predictable we have become, or is that just because we are "so ahead of our time"?
I really hate to say this, but having your own domain name doesn't necessarily work for making yourself findable to non-geeks.
I've got bauser.com (and I've had it since 1999). The top 10 results on Google for my name are my homepage or pages that link to my homepage. (Also, my homepage is the second result for a search of my last name alone.) And yet, so far as I know, nobody in my real life has ever contacted me through that domain without me telling me about them first.
(The worse example? My sister-in-law called me on the phone a few months ago to ask for my e-mail address.)
I join Facebook, on the other hand, and get two dozen friend requests from people I went to high school with. Apparently, nobody I went to high school with knows how to use the Google.
I honestly, truly think there are a lot of people out there who would rather "find" their friends on a familiar site like Facebook than seach the Big Scary Internet. That pisses off my Inner Angry Geek, but it's true.
Hysterically funny and wonderfully wry sense of humor. Kudos.
I'm hosting a Facebook vanity URL party via Twitter. Use the #fburlparty tag to take part, and view your tweet here http://bit.ly/10xK1W.
Thank you so much for your concise future report on FU Facebook. Now I won't need to wait for the breaking news. You broke it!
This read was the most fun I've had reading a blog post for a long time!
That was hilarious. But I just went to the URL toolbar of Firefox, typed in Facebook.com/francinehardaway and got....my page. I've had the ability to do this for months. So what's new on Friday night?
Amazing and will probably turn out to be so accurate that Nostradamus would be quaking in his boots if he was still kicking around :)
Anil, You are The Man.
Yes, this is very funny. And yes, it is insightful. But the best thing about it, in my opinion, is that is is so spot-on that it could define a whole new genre of satire: preemptive satire. Preemptive satire anticipates the event it mocks, making it pointless for the thing to transpire. We could use more of this.
HAHAHAHA! I was laughing so hard I almost spat my coffee all over my laptop.
Excellent post!
very very funny, thanks anil. i wonder how the Facebook Username Dispute Resolution Community will deal with #facesquatters
this is good.
This is Laugh Out Loud funny. Will be fun to track how accurate your forecast of future events is. Probably right on the money!
Thanks for a good Friday morning laugh!
Anil, This is cool. I particularly liked the stuff about the search's by prospective employers. This is for real and most ppl won't realize this.
Bebo has had "friendly URLs" and usernames since it launched. Before AOL ever owned it so the last prediction makes no sense.
That was hilarious and I can't wait for the bingo blotter to fill in.
But you forget to mention one thing:
November 2nd, 2009:
A Facebook stalker is arrested for the murder of a person of the same name who managed to claim the Facebook Username first. The suspect is eventually put in a psych ward, and not allowed to handle anything stiffer than construction paper.
The corporate trademark thing is already covered -- dozens of companies have had vanity URLs for months.
E.g.,
AT&T - http://www.facebook.com/pages/ATT/6114253084
Whole Foods - http://www.facebook.com/wholefoods
Starbucks - http://www.facebook.com/Starbucks
Marriott International - http://www.facebook.com/pages/Marriott-Hotels-Resorts/71222795393
It's been reported elsewhere that if you want to register using a trademarked name, you'll have to put in your government-issued trademark number to verify.
omg, lmao... but I can assure you that AOL started thinking about friendly urls 3 years ago and the committee was disbanded!
Arne likes this.
I know Bebo has that feature. That doesn't seem to contradict my prediction, though.
wait...what do you mean that I can register a domain name, that I own, rather than having another url at facebook.com?
-robert
late to the game but love this post!
[this is great]
I've had my own domain name for over a decade now. It's based around a nickname I haven't used for a few years, but everyone I know personally remembers it and uses it to check up on me every once in a while. Ten years ago, if you searched for that name, it was the only result on Google. Now there's a band and some other bloggers using the name, but mine is still the number one result.
Yes, it's a blog. It was a blog when blogs were still web logs. I have my own domain name because I don't get why people want to be just an ancillary portion of a greater conglomeration. :(
Best blog post of 2009 yet (present and future).
I got my name as the username.
You don't need 1,000 Fans to get your own username.
Your Facebook account must be registered before June 9 as the only criteria.
Mike
This is hilarious. However your prediction: "and 85% of which contain one or more typos or deviations from standard spellings of English words" is clearly an enormous over-estimate of the capabilities of English language speakers. I would say more like 95%+...
It's a bit after 1am. #FUFacebook isn't trending on Twitter yet, but "FB Url" is up there. Great call, Anil. You totally nailed it with this one. By the way, everybody just go buy a domain. :)
Your post omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own instead of having another URL on $brand.
awesome job. I got to to about 1am before I couldn't contain my desire to post a comment thanking you for such a masterful timeline of the Facebook Username phenomenon. Excellent job!
June 13, 12:02am: An enterprising and mischevious nerd who is definitely not me squats on the username of a notable tech trade reporter like Michael Arrington.
"arrington, michaelarrington and michael.arrington were all not available. decided not to be marrington1 for the rest of my life on fb." -- http://twitter.com/arrington/status/2150353523
Wait, huh? Anil, can you explain the part about domain names again? You mean, like I could get http://www.facebook.com/user/www.jayallen.org? That sounds HAWESOME!!! Where do I sign up?
When does trading of Facebook usernames start?
Okay, if that was supposed to be funny IT WAS. I laughed my... laughed out...
Anil, I need some new technical jargon. What is the new, cool term for LOL??? I don't want to suck on my first post to your blog, and btw why have I not discovered you before? Or even better, why have YOU not found me? ?
And only one person will notice that you say "add me on facebook or something" but you never provided your FB Username...
LOL
You could be the FU prophet (for a profit?)
Thanks for the smiles.
Wonder how on track your predictions were? Love the June 19th, 9AM one - Facebook surpasses Linkedin and no one know the FB privacy settings. That one's bound to happen sooner or later!
(Must go read up on FB privacy settings.)
Very amusing post! But I'm afraid some are taking the new feature a bit too seriously. The Facebook username feature is now predicting the future and providing advice, and some seem to be putting too much faith in this new technology. Mark the calendar, for better or worse, "psychic crowdsourcing" has been born.
Damn! I'm too late on reading this brilliant prophecy.
June 21, 12:01am: After you sign-up for your FB username, your musician profile will be lost forever.