Facebook’s (And Other Social Platform’s) Preferential Treatment Should Not Be Ignored

Unless you’ve been living under a rock or haven’t paid your Internet provider or don’t have a Facebook account (that leaves about 2% of you out there surfing the web) you already know about Facebook’s announcement to finally give users the option to have a vanity URL, i.e. www.facebook.com/your.username

According to the blog post, there are some rules:

Facebook usernames will be available in basic text forms, and you can only choose a single username for your profile and for each of the Pages that you administer. 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 (”.”). While usernames are currently available only for Romanized text, we’re looking at how we might support non-Romanized characters in the future.

I remembered a while back that Oprah had gotten a vanity URL before a lot of us. But that’s fine because she is Oprah.

But then yesterday on FriendFeed I read that Allen Stern was asking Gary V. how he’d gotten his vanity URL. Some of us weighed in saying that Gary’s page, like Oprah’s, was a not a username, but a Fan Page vanity URL. Allen asked how you could get one and I thought I’d read that anyone can get a Fan Page, but you must have at least 1,000 followers to get the vanity URL.

But shortly after, Jesse Stay chimed in. He has 1,000 followers and has never been able to talk to anyone in Facebook to get a vanity URL. Wait, what?

Jorge I have a fan page with greater than 1,000 followers and they wouldn’t respond to me. I wrote 2 books on Facebook, and know a bunch of the executives there. It’s about picking and choosing – loic got one, garyvee got one, techcrunch got one, allfacebook got one. They’re being very selective

I’ve reached out to Jesse to see which Fan Page he tried to get a vanity URL for, but if this is the case, it sounds awfully like that other stinking business with the “Suggested User List” that Dave Winer and others have been talking about so much lately.

Social Media platforms should treat all its users with the same set of rules and not give preferences to people because they like them or not. Tell me I need 10,000 followers and at least 6 months in your platform and I will agree to the rules. Make the rules fuzzy and you have a backlash that might or might not affect your entry to the community.

And going back to rules, guess how many letters Mark Zuckerberg’s vanity URL has?

Update: Techcrunch is now reporting that Facebook employees and “influential” journalists are getting their URLs before everybody else.

Tagged as: fail, sul