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Facebook is opening its doors to user names. Previously, users logged in to Facebook using their email address. But as of 9:01 p.m. Pacific tonight, that all changes. User names are up for grabs. And the hype is through the roof right now.
When a service first starts up, many of the early adopters rush to get the best names, or the user name that they sign up for on most services. For instance, my name is common. It’s pretty hard to find becky as an open user name. So I try something else. In the last several years, I pretty much sign up for everything under a particular user name. Twitter. Skype. Flickr. Tumblr. You get the idea.
But on Facebook, you had to settle for your email address. Not any more.
Over the past week or so, there’s been a note at the top of the home page when you log in to Facebook. It noted that you can set your user name as of this Friday (today, as of the time I’m writing this on the west coast). I had actually forgotten about it until I saw all of the tweets. And there were a lot of them.
It’s not showing on trending topics on Twitter yet, but within a minute of searching Facebook on Twitter search, there were 300 more results coming in for that search. I’d say it’s on its way.
And so far, no word of delays, crashes, or trouble getting to the sign up page. However, a few users reported not being able to get to their profile once they set up their user name.
It’s a great big land grab as people rush to get their preferred user name. It’ll be interesting to see the resulting tweets in the morning. In fact, it appears that one major blogger has already seen his brand taken by someone who beat him to the punch. Facebook claims that your user name cannot be changed once it has been set. So we’ll be watching to see if Facebook allows this blogger to get his brand back (especially since the other Facebook user said he would be happy to give up the brand’s name). Is it squatting, or just opportunistic? We will be watching to see how it plays out.
Are any of you going to go and get your user name? Does it matter to you?
image: ToOliver2
