Craig Agranoff (@lapp) blogged about this too, over at http://bit.ly/10EvpD. These were my thoughts:

The facebook “landrush” for profile usernames was a rush for fool’s gold. As I tweeted on June 13th, the morning after, lol, “Facebook vanity urls? Color me unimpressed. Surprised at all the experts and gurus who are in a frenzy, like babies groping for a teat.”

Only time and some new application will tell us if we’re wrong. But here are just two reasons why we’re not wrong right now:

1) the era of the vanity URL has pretty much passed. There’s still some value in a good URL, no denying that, but the real value is in content and “google-juice” – which will win out over a domain name almost every time. Can’t get “craigagranoff.com”? Not a big deal, really. Get something else that’s related to you or a niche, fill it with great content, and people will find you.

2) the era of the “free service” domain name ended long ago. There’s NO VALUE to it, and too much risk. I’m not big on “should’s”, but NOBODY should rely on a free service like facebook to be their URL. It’s too easy and cheap now to get a URL that you “own” – like, oh, pizzatweetup.com, for example – for less than $US10, and forward that to your facebook profile or page if you so choose, or better yet, create an actual website for pizzatweetup and use your facebook profile or page to link to that.

From the hypothetical pizzatweetup website, or any website for that matter, a text link or icon to “Friend Me on Facebook” or “Become A Fan on Facebook” renders the actual url of that facebook link (/agranoff or /pizzapizza) irrelevant. Worst case, someone goes looking for you on facebook, a simple search will find YOU. I don’t think you’ll lose too many, what…visitors? who type in facebook.com/pizzapizza for some reason and give up from there. And if they weren’t looking for you, but were looking for random pizza information and expecting that the facebook vanity url they type in would lead them to it, well…you probably didn’t want that visitor, anyway.

The bottom line for traffic and search is not the URL of a site, but how that site is promoted.

Craig Agranoff (@lapp) blogged about this too, over at http://bit.ly/10EvpD. These were my thoughts:

The facebook “landrush” for profile usernames was a rush for fool’s gold. As I tweeted on June 13th, the morning after, lol, “Facebook vanity urls? Color me unimpressed. Surprised at all the experts and gurus who are in a frenzy, like babies groping for a teat.”

Only time and some new application will tell us if we’re wrong. But here are just two reasons why we’re not wrong right now:

1) the era of the vanity URL has pretty much passed. There’s still some value in a good URL, no denying that, but the real value is in content and “google-juice” – which will win out over a domain name almost every time. Can’t get “craigagranoff.com”? Not a big deal, really. Get something else that’s related to you or a niche, fill it with great content, and people will find you.

2) the era of the “free service” domain name ended long ago. There’s NO VALUE to it, and too much risk. I’m not big on “should’s”, but NOBODY should rely on a free service like facebook to be their URL. It’s too easy and cheap now to get a URL that you “own” – like, oh, pizzatweetup.com, for example – for less than $US10, and forward that to your facebook profile or page if you so choose, or better yet, create an actual website for pizzatweetup and use your facebook profile or page to link to that.

From the hypothetical pizzatweetup website, or any website for that matter, a text link or icon to “Friend Me on Facebook” or “Become A Fan on Facebook” renders the actual url of that facebook link (/agranoff or /pizzapizza) irrelevant. Worst case, someone goes looking for you on facebook, a simple search will find YOU. I don’t think you’ll lose too many, what…visitors? who type in facebook.com/pizzapizza for some reason and give up from there. And if they weren’t looking for you, but were looking for random pizza information and expecting that the facebook vanity url they type in would lead them to it, well…you probably didn’t want that visitor, anyway.

The bottom line for traffic and search is not the URL of a site, but how that site is promoted.