The first round of Facebook vanity URLs proved to be a huge success. Within minutes of the feature being made available, Mashable reported that over 200,000 usernames had been registered. If you didn’t pick up a URL the first night, head over to Facebook.com/username to register one now.
But what if you were trying to get a URL for one of your Facebook Pages and found that you couldn’t? In the first round, Facebook restricted the vanity URL feature to Pages with 1000 fans or more. If your group had 999 fans or less, you were out of luck… until now. This Sunday at midnight ET, Facebook will be opening the vanity URL feature to ALL pages, regardless of the number of fans.
The vanity URL feature is still for only usernames and Pages. Facebook Groups don’t yet have the option of getting one.
If you’re up right now, don’t forget to take advantage of the opening of Facebook Vanity URLs which changes the address of your profile from something like this:
facebook.com/9581189
to this:
facebook.com/your.name
Not sure what to pick? Standard domain name rules apply. Pick something easy to remember, easy to spell and as short as possible. I tried for /guin but it turns out the username has to be at least five characters, so I managed to snag facebook.com/guinevere.
I’m back in Canada after a week in Warsaw at the Input Conference for public broadcasters. In addition to attending, I had the opportunity to present one of the programs that I do the interactive production for. I’m really pleased that both the program and my presentation were very well received by the audience. I had lots of people come and speak to me after about how we use the internet to cast the show and build an audience leading up to the broadcast. That show is always a fun project and I’m glad it received enthusiastic attention from an international audience.
In addition to my part, I got to take in a lot of other multi-platform projects as well as straight television programs from every part of the world. I saw soap operas from Palestine, documentaries from Iran, talk shows from Denmark, game shows from South Korea and more. It was interesting to see what’s happening outside of the North American media market that I normally experience.
The dialog about what role public broadcasters are taking globally in an increasing commercialized and multi-screen media world was interesting as well. I didn’t realize that most public broadcasters skew to the 50+ crowd. All of us need to grow more in the younger markets.
Myself and some of the other people that I work with that also attended the conference are organizing a mini-Input for our co-workers this fall, but for my readers now, I leave you with links to some of the projects that I saw when I was there.
Here’s a clip from Neveneffecten (armageddon episode that I saw) where one lonely nerd is returning home after the world learns that a giant comet is attracted to him and will collide with earth, ending all life as a result.
I had to pick a clip where there wasn’t much speech — I saw the show subtitled. Anyway, if you’d like to see some international shows, check out some of these projects and enjoy!
The first round of Facebook vanity URLs proved to be a huge success. Within minutes of the feature being made available, Mashable reported that over 200,000 usernames had been registered. If you didn’t pick up a URL the first night, head over to Facebook.com/username to register one now.
