Facebook Username

June 13, 2009 @ 11:55 am · Filed under Computers & WWW

Last night facebook launched a username option which allows visitors to the site to go straight to a profile by putting the username in the URL. I of course made sure I snagged my username as soon as the system went live, so you can now access my facebook profile (if I have granted you access to it of course), on the following URL

www.facebook.com/kieranoshea

Sadly I wasn’t able to snag “kieran” for a username as it had already been taken – Kieran Cloonan I’m looking at you – grrr! I could have had “oshea” but having that as a username seemed to bring back distant memories of being called by my surname at school so I decided against it. The username “oshea” has in fact now been taken so Ben O’Shea, I wish you the best of luck with it.

All in all I think this is a good move by facebook. While some might criticise it and say it’s just another step towards becoming MySpace, I see it as more of a step towards the modern web. PHP files and arguments in the URL are so last century. Pretty permalinks and restful behaviour are what it is all about these days. While I can’t see facebook truly implementing a restful URL structure they have certainly made an important forward step with usernames.

 

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