It’s coming. “Soon you will be able to have a username.” Facebook’s countdown is set for Friday, June 12th, 11:01CST. Just after the stroke of eleven, the world’s biggest nerds will frantically begin logging into Facebook with the intent on grabbing as many great vanity URLs they can land across several accounts. To their misfortune, unsuspecting companies around the world will ignore this.
For unsuspecting business owners, the Facebook vanity URL registration has an enormous flaw. Try as you might, there is a good chance you won’t be able to register your company’s vanity URL. Unless your company had a Facebook page setup prior to May 31, 2009 AND has at least 1,000 fans, you won’t be eligible to claim your vanity URL during the first round of registration (the second round begins June 28, 2009).
Although, John Doe with a dummy profile that meets the requirements can grab your company vanity URL, no questions asked. To combat this, Facebook is helping business owners to prevent the registration of their company name(s), so the vanity URL can be protected. Before filling out the prevention ticket, you must provide your company registration number. I know what you’re thinking, “I’ll just set up my company Facebook profile now and grab it.” Wrong. Facebook does not allow companies to have profiles; only pages. And so the fiasco begins.
Up for grabs: thousands of great brand names of companies that have less than 1,000 fans. Then there are the fan-established pages for companies like Audi. There are eight that are currently eligible to register the vanity URL /audi/. Oh! And if it’s a “hate” account, like “Twilight Sucks,” with over 3,000 fans, they are also going to be eligible to grab the vanity URL for Twilight because they meet all of Facebook’s requirements.
Even though Facebook claims vanity URLs are permanent and can’t be transferred, they do reserve the right to remove the vanity URL from you. Loop holes abound! Although the URLs are permanent, I won’t be surprised to hear about these über nerds making money by selling their account login with their parked vanity URLs to business owers.
Update: Facebook is now offering Intellectual Property protection with a new form for those who don’t have registered trademarks.