Vanity URLs

I’m a huge fan of Vanity URLs. What’s better than the ability to create your own, easy-to-find web address that can direct people to your personal or business social networking profiles? I mean, Twitter is a great example. It doesn’t get much easier than typing in Twitter.com/”your name here”.

The White House is a prime example of making itself extraordinarily easy to find on the web, thanks to custom URLs. Simply visit any of the major social networking sites and add a “/whitehouse” to the end of the URL. Voila! You’ve found the White House. This certainly improves search engine rankings for these profiles, as well.

Up until now, such a feature was only available on Facebook to the few and the very privileged (i.e. the White House and Ashton Kutcher). Starting June 13, Facebook is opening the doors to its 200 million users, allowing them to choose their own URL. I, for one, am tickled that I’ll have a personalized URL that can easily direct people to my profile.

Some others aren’t so thrilled, apparently. According to an article in Mashable this morning, some are worried this will lead to cyber-squatting, a loss of privacy and too much overt similarity to MySpace. What do you think?

For businesses, this will certainly be a positive development, ensuring they can more easily direct people to fan pages with simple URLs (assuming they’re able to stake a claim on the right URL!).

My advice? If you don’t want to lose your perfect URL for yourself or your business, be logged in to Facebook at 12 a.m. ET on June 13! See you there!

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