The Hindu News Update Service
News Update Service
Sunday, June 14, 2009 : 0945 Hrs
Sci. & Tech.
Claim your Facebook URL early! Cybersquatters on the prowl
Houston (PTI): Race to grab your own URLs on the social networking group,
Facebook, is on. Claim it early before it is all gone.
It all started midnight on Saturday, when Facebook debuted usernames for
companies, individuals and groups, in order to finally enable everyone to grab
an easy-to-remember, easy-to-share URL for a profile or page.
If you are late, you still can do it, all you got to do is to hit
facebook.com/usernames in your browser. You'll be prompted to login and, upon
doing so,
if qualified, you'll be given some initial options for Facebook usernames.
If the initial selections aren't what you want, just click on "More" to reveal
a field where you can enter your own username and check its availability.
If it is available, that's it, just accept it to save your changes.
Within seven minutes of the service being available last night, 3,45,000 users
grabbed one. Within 15 minutes, over a half million had, Facebook usernames,
spokesperson Larry Yu said.
With Facebook offering vanity URLs for the first time, social media expert
Susan Jacobson of Temple University's journalism department, advises
organisations
as well as celebrities and politicians to claim their URLs early to avoid
having to battle later with a cybersquatter.
"Generally speaking the best defense against cybersquatting or potential
malicious use of a famous name is to register accounts in your company's name on
new social media sites as soon as they emerge," she explained.
Ms. Jacobson likens it to the early days of the Internet when regular citizens
would rush to buy domain names (i.e.www.madonna.com) and then sell them to
celebrities for millions of dollars.
Famous name Facebook users are going to be interested in the vanity URLs
because it will make it easier for non-Facebook users to find them, notes Ms.
Jacobson.
Those Facebook users who restrict access to their information may find it more
convenient for their friends to connect to them with the vanity URLs, but
their friends will still have to log in to see their restricted information,
she said.
But according to the service, one name has already sold, though it has to be
bogus. Assetize just started partially blocking out names sold so you can't
see which ones were purchased, but if you load the page you will see
facebook.com/alex.
What else is odd about this is that alex is a 4-letter URL, which is against
Facebook's rules. So unless it was a Facebook employee who got the URL and
was selling it, the whole thing seems to be a sham.
Not everyone was happy with the results of the URL landgrab, as most of the
people didn't get the names they wanted within minutes of login. Goodluck, if
you got your's.
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