Last friday night A week ago friday, at midnight hundreds of thousands of you around the world rushed to grab the vanity url (http://facebook.com/username) of your dreams. Within minutes millions of names had been snatched up, leaving many frustrated that they couldn’t be the numero uno Mike or Steve on facebook, but it also meant a lot of fake accounts were setup to snatch generic names as well.

Apparently Facebook had thought of making it an auction, or charging for names, but ultimately decided against it because of the server load issues that would have ensued.  Personally I think they should have charged for fan pages to get custom urls if they are going to be used for commercial purposes, that’s only fair.  Those of us that didn’t secure names for our fan pages will have to wait until the 28th when they open it up to the rest of the world (i.e. the 99% of pages with under 1000 fans).

One thing though that was really silly was all the people who snatched up names thinking they were going to be able to sell them later. The thing is these people were getting the names/keywords for personal profiles, not fan pages. Its a collosal waste to build a brand or product offering on facebook using a personal profile and not a fan page. I’ll get into the whys later, but just know that you are seriously wasting opportunity by using a personal profile account for a business.

What’s going to happen to these names like /whiskey (i REALLY wanted that one, got stuck with /drinkwhiskey instead) that were pinned to user profiles? Well ultimately its going to come down to facebook yanking them, or they go to waste. Will a secondary market arise? Sure, but only for fan pages, not for personal profiles. Those who buy great keywords with hopes of turning these minor personal profiles into commercial landing pages will be sad when they realize they’ve wasted what could be hundreds of dollars on something useless.

So my advice, create a valuable page with content on it, promote it, and then see if you can grab your desired name on June 28. If you want to give yourself a clever personal username, make it something representative of you/your personality, or better yet: protect your personal brand name.

A year or so ago, Facebook unveiled something that has radically changed the landscape of the web and social networking sites in particular. As the first major and tightly integrated social network application platform (SNAP) to hit the market, Facebook was able to shift our expectations from what we had previously expected to get from a social site to something with theoretically endless possibilities. What emerged next, I don't think even facebook had the foresight to predict.< ... Continue reading

The fact that his account with 5000 friends on it was shut off doesn't upset me one iota. Wanna know why? Because his account is a perfect example of a unidirectional relationship, completely going against the concept of friends (disclaimer, I follow his twitter feed, but its not the same thing). The idea of a friend connection in a social network is supposed to be you agree to a two way communication exchange. Do you really think a man with 5,000 social network friends will ever pay attention to what you're asking him seeing as you've likely never met him in person? So in his case you " ... Continue reading

Facebook posted late last night that they were opening up their canvas pages to search robots in an effort to make facebook more accessible to the masses who still do not have facebook accounts. This is a significant move on their part, for multiple reasons: 1. it turns on the power of millions and millions of pages of user generated content and their related search bait, and 2. it will allow for app developer's pages to ... Continue reading

So hopefully you've caught wind of the $240,000,000 that Microsoft invested in Facebook today, if not you can read about it everywhere else. So aside from the mind blowing $15 Billion valuation, what does this mean to you and me? Well probably more to me than you, ... Continue reading

The infinimedia team is here in Sunnyvale, California attending the CommunityNext: Platform conference, and we decided to participate in the Iron Coder competition.  The premise is who can build an app in 24 hours and garner the most users. However there were some stipulations: 1. it had to be educational, 2. it had to be international.  So with those rules in mind, we decided to build Continue reading

AT&T has a new developer challenge for facebook in which it will pay $5,000 to the best integration of their own API (had no idea that existed) and Facebook's platform. The contest requires you to integrate at least one core facebook function (poking, messaging, photos, etc.) with a mo ... Continue reading

The talk around the water cooler last week was all about Microsoft trying to snag a 5% stake in Facebook for $500 Million, which would in effect put Facebook’s valuation somewhere around $10 billion. Lots of rumors began swirling around that Google would come in and offer more for that same 5% in order to lock MS out of the action, this could make strategic sense, but we’ll see about its validity. So you must be thinking, “$10 Billion????!?!?!?! HOLY S#!T OMG WTF,” because to many that seems like an astronomical num ... Continue reading