Facebook Vanity URL’s Hysteria

Odrakir — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 13:10:09 +0000

Much has been said since Facebook allowed the new “vanity URL’s” (or user url’s like I rather call it, since vanity urls is purely an american expression adopted from the vanity plates they have in their cars).

Most of the posts about this are from users bitching about the way Facebook roll out this feature, allowing the users to choose any alias to be used in http://www.facebook.com/whateveryouchoose regardless of their username, unlike Twitter that has http://www.twitter.com/username. Others rant about the fact that Facebook should have provided something like http://user.facebook.com, forgeting that Facebook has milions of users and something like that would have a termendous weight in their DNSs…

But, as always, there’s something good to learn. One of the posts I read about this subject (no link, sorry, can’t find it) mentioned a cool way to give your Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, [insert your favorite social network here] URL’s to other people, that is, if you have your own domain.

In my case, my domain is odrakir.com, so I created some subdomains redirecting to the social networks I use the most:

This way, I can give an url that’s easy to memorize and always mentions my “brand name”, cool enough to use on a visit card

odrakir.com » linkedin

Facebook Vanity URL’s Hysteria