Last week, Facebook announced they would be opening the site for “vanity URLs” which are simply names after the address of the website.  For instance, “twitter.com/abvegan” is a vanity URL as opposed to “twitter.com/index.php?option=user?id=588u234″

Facebook decided to open the site to these requests all at once with a timer counting down at facebook.com/username this means over 500,000 users registered a unique username for their accounts within a mere 15 minutes.  That has to be some kind of record.

Numerous vegans were likely going after the “vegan” URL (including yours truly) but were disappointed to see the URL was unavailable.  However, taking a look at facebook.com/vegan yields a “page not found” response, so who has it?

Facebook.com/vegan?

Perhaps the vegan society had already beat us to the punch.  In order to protect trademark enfringement, the popular social community offered for trademarks to protect their names from being taken from users (so no one could register “facebook.com/cocacola”)  Others believe facebook may have reserved a number of handy usernames to be later sold in an auction format.

Otherwise, vegans were happy to come up with their own URLs like Jeffrey Coolwater’s /coolwater4animals, Mark Sheppard’s /veganism and me?  I scored “/govegan” oh yeah.

For some vegan facebook users, they just want to be the first to have a good name without having to add a random number to the end or a “4u” kind of disambiguation.

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Technorati Tags: 15 minutes, facebook, names, punch, rush, timer, vanity url, vegan, vegans

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