Are Facebook Vanity URL's pointless?

After the buzz - what is it worth?

We’ve all noticed the similarities between Facebook  and Twitter lately. Since trying to purchase Twitter earlier this year, Facebook has faced a sort of identity crisis, adopting the question-based status updates, revamped news feed and, most recently, the vanity URL.

Now, people say the vanity URLs add a personal touch to social media and allow users to jump directly to specific pages, rather than searching through hundreds of fans. Seems useful and efficient — exactly what people want and need…in theory.

Clicking through a random sample of every 10 of my 620 friends, 18 had vanity URLs registered. That’s 29% of my profile’s friends, which actually surprised me considering how little I hear Facebook vanity URLs discussed. In the entire Facebook population, the personalized Web addresses are even more popular than among my personal population. Within the first three minutes of the feature’s inception, 200,000 people had registered a custom name. Three days later, nearly 6 million users had jumped on the bandwagon, according to a survey conducted in June.

Despite its quick rise to fame, it seems the feature has flatlined since it was introduced in mid-June. Are vanity URLs on Facebook pointless? On Twitter, they make perfect sense. Tweeple use Twitter for information more so than pictures, videos and other personal information many seek on Facebook. Facebook is about relationships, while Twitter is about networking.

Therefore, it makes sense that if a Twit wants the latest updates from CNN, they will go directly to @cnnbrk. No muss. No fuss. The information you want, and only the information you want. That’s what Twitter is all about.

Facebook…not so much. I guess it might be useful for individual public figures and larger corporations with Fan Pages, who use Facebook in much the same way they use Twitter. But for individual profiles, I don’t see the need for a vanity URL.

Final rant: Where do you find a Facebook profile’s vanity URL? It’s not listed anywhere on the page. It’s not listed when you search a user. You can only make use of the shortcut if the user informs you, and who really remembers to do that? Again, pointless.  Rant over.

Alyson (Follow me! @AlyandtheCity)

Comments

[CharityHisle]

One positive to the Facebook vanity URL: You can print it on your business card and you don't have to depend on the stability of vanity url shortning through sites like tinyurl, bit.ly, or tr.im.

[Dustin Coates]

You find the vanity URL in the address bar. And they may be pointless if you only meet people online, but when you're meeting people offline it's a lot easier for me to say "Friend me at http://facebook.com/dcoates." instead of "Friend me at http://facebook.com/profile.php?id=38600043" or "Search for Dustin Coates. I'm the third one down."

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