Peace, Love & Blog

June 15, 2009, 4:55 pm

Celebrity, Product and Joke Names Grabbed as Facebook Vanity URLs

Turns out I wasn’t the only nerd hunched over a laptop this weekend trying to secure a personalized Web address for my Facebook profile.

Nearly six million members of the popular social networking Web site have registered a custom name since the feature became available late Friday night. Currently, there are around 200 million members on Facebook, so less than 5 percent of the total Facebook population has signed up so far.

The next step involves people hoping to profit with the names. For example, on Assetize, a marketplace for Web domains, Twitter and Web accounts, multiple Facebook vanity URLs have gone up on the auction block, including Facebook.com/Nasa, Facebook.com/iPhones and Facebook.com/HPComputers.

But it’s not actually clear yet whether these names are worth anything.

A Facebook spokesman, Larry Yu, said the company was looking at the emerging commerce in vanity URLs. “We are working through how we are going to address that. Generally speaking our policy is a strict no-transferability clause,” he said.

Many Facebook users found their actual names were unavailable by the time they went to register them. Facebook gave first crack to its own employees and partners. It also offered the privilege to some journalists. (Times reporters did not get early access). Although the company said it was taking steps to prevent the cybersquatting of popular names and companies, some celebrities like Snoop Dogg, George Bush, Kanye West, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sergey Brin still found themselves with Facebook doppelgängers.

In addition, many Facebookers took a lighter approach to the process and elected to register comical names, such as Facebook.com/Twitterisbetter, Facebook.com/LizLemon and Facebook.com/pagenotfound.

Though Mr. Yu said the formation of Facebook’s dispute resolution process was a work in progress, he said that the company would look at rescinding a vanity Web address when the registering party does not have legal right to it.

“If it’s a dispute between two users, then it’s first come first serve. But if the user’s name isn’t actually the vanity URL he registered, the user shouldn’t have a right to grab that,” Mr. Yu said. “We want it to be associated with user identity. I don’t want to be completely definitive but that is the one thing we want to actively encourage.”