Is it weird that I still don't use GMail much because my customary username (not this one) was taken by the time I finagled an invite? I don't really have a second choice, so I just stick with Yahoo! Mail. I guess I'm more vain than I think...
My name's ever so common - it's taken in all the popular domain extensions, all the major email services, most of the social sites (I got in early on Twitter!). It's a pain; I don't want to use a "nickname" and I really don't want numbers at the end of my name.
Then again, because so many people share my name, I'm barely traceable on Google which I quite like.
(It's the reason I use the startup email provider Zenbe. They had my name available. I just hope they don't go tits up!)
My name's not too common, Thomas Shaddox, but the problem is, a domain will noticably have "ass" in it. ;) I've toyed around with buying tomshaddox.com, but I really don't want to go by "Tom," but I do have tshaddox.com for now.
I know in the tech community its nice to be able to link together all of your different 'profiles' so that people can find them. However, I really don't see this as being a feature that 'normal' people will use. When was the last time you actually visited someone's profile page without following a link for them off either your news feed or a friends profile? Unless Facebook's game is to try and move away from the 'friendship' model and open the whole system up.
My argument against Facebook vanity url's is that Facebook was originally designed to be for people who were actual friends irl. They could easily search for and add one another, and there was so need to give out static url's because there was no real public information other than a bit of profile info and a picture for search purposed.
This doesn't seem in the spirit of what Facebook is (or perhaps was). The idea with Facebook for the average user was that only your friends (i.e. actual friends irl) could see your full profile, and others searching for you would just see a bit of info and a picture. Of course, that's changing now with celebrity and corporate fan pages, so I'm sure they're just trying to adapt, but I think they're getting away from the service they originally provided. I suppose to do that is to risk failure while hoping for the reward of becoming a broader service.
It looks like Techcrunch are using a URL shortening tool at http://awe.sm for their http://tcrn.ch domain. The utm_* is for Google Analytics tracking. I imagine peter123 didn't mean to submit the whole URL, but just got to the article through the shortener
I could see this being useful if Facebook evolves into more of a LinkedIn; people could put their Facebook URLs onto their business cards.
Also, when I meet a stranger, it would definitely be easier to find them if I could just go directly to their vanity URL, which might be more mnemonically accessible.
