Interesting! Dots have no significance.

http://www.facebook.com/spen.cer........fry is the same as:

http://www.facebook.com/spencerfry

Thanks for pointing that out. I was having a hard time choosing between name.lastname and namelastname.

same for gmail with dots

I couldn't choose my first name; "Jeroen" (common dutch name) saying it was not available? Odd because there is no profile on facebook.com/jeroen , well, there are worse things in life.

Anyone here planning on registering under a username/alias rather than your real name?

Can you actually register under a fake name now, or just have a different one publicly viewable? Back in 2006, I got kicked off of Facebook for registering as the pseudonym I used on the internet. It wasn't anyone else's name, but there'd be no way for them to know that. Have they changed their policies?

Edit: their Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (TOS) says you have to sign up under your real name (section 4.1): http://www.facebook.com/terms.php?ref=pf

Right now this is just used for vanity URLs, it doesn't change the name you're registered under.

If you are prepared to use a non ascii character in your user name you can often register weird names.

The dot shouldn't matter. As with Gmail, it looks like it treats it the same way (try going to Facebook.com/z.uck vs Facebook.com/zuck)

I tried writing my 3 letter name like : a.b.c so the link would have been abc . But it still didn't let me unfortunately.

There's a minimum length. It probably ignores the periods just like Gmail does.

I got my name without the dot, but it still works with a dot.

I'm planning to try for my full name, there's a couple of significant people on the web with the same name as me so I'm hoping to get to it first. Also have an extra browser open with my wifes account loaded up, hoping to be first to get hers as well.

We're both going for firstnamelastname without periods, hyphens etc (although we're using the 'short' version of our firstnames - Andy & Steph - rather than the full version.

My first attempt will be only my first name.

If my 3 letter first name does not catch then first initial then full last.

From the Facebook blog post:

> "Your username must be at least five characters in length and only include alphanumeric characters (A-Z, 0-9), or a period or full stop (".")."

Might be better to go for your latter option first.

That's a bit of a disadvantage for people with short first names, but I can understand it. I wonder how many names will be mike.the.great and so on

So...anyone tried to sell one of these yet?

If I was prepared to re-register on Facebook, ask my friends to move over to the new account and clear my photos, presumably there isn't really any other reason why I couldn't eBay the vanity URL. I think the most likely problem would be if Facebook spotted what I was doing and decided to close the account. Has anyone tried it yet?

EDIT: I see some for sale on Assetize already. Will be interesting to see how this turns out.

It's quite fun to see who took a link, like http://www.facebook.com/hacker.news or http://www.facebook.com/the.great . Well, at least for a few minutes, after which you forget about it.

I got my first.last name, which I share with 3 students at by Big 10 school and well over 500 members of Facebook.

I beat out a senator, astrophysicist and author to claim my name.

I got my first.last as well.

If it said I could change it I would have tried a million other things, though.

I didn't know I couldn't change it afterwards, so I ended up with something a bit weird... but lets just not talk about that :P

Were popular names awarded randomly? I went for my name within seconds and it was already taken. It seems like they would just take all requests and randomize for a winner...

Many common first names are taken by facebook employees - including the facebook.com/andrew above, or facebook.com/brian.

Thanks for the submission. I'm happy to have a username I like.

Damn, I had been trying to remember this all week, so I could get "jrock", but I forgot and someone else got it. Of course you know, this means war.

(Oh well, I don't even use Facebook.)

I was so quick to get my desired username, kfischer, that I didn't even think of the username I should have taken... rupertmurdochsucks.

And case has no significance. ChrisRyland is the same as chrisryland (and the same as chris.ryland, thanks to period ignorance).

Was able to pickup my first name: http://facebook.com/nirmal

Was able to get my desired name:

http://facebook.com/dharmesh

Oddly, that makes me happy.

Looks like all the names with the string "php" in them are disallowed.

It's times like these when I am very thankful for my unique name.

except it's 4 characters =P

What sucks is that www.facebook.com/username/ doesn't work...wtf

This has been fixed.

"awesome" was taken :(

My friends got nicholascage, hamburgers, and thepixies..

I tried hamburgers!

Thats was my first try

Hmm, kinda sucks my name got taken minutes in.

google is still available, although I wouldn't register that since I doubt you'll get to keep it long

I think dictionary words don't work, I guess maybe google is a verb and isn't available :P

I couldn't find any mention of that in the help, but it sounds like a valid limitation. Do you know of any supporting documentation?

I'm just guessing from what I saw. I don't have any supporting documentation, sorry :). I edited my comment to make it a bit more clear.

"notavailable is not available"

Didn't give me the option to use just my first name, I guess I might have just missed out on it though.