Face book the most outstanding social networking system today has announced that vanity URL will be available to all profiles and fan pages at 12:01 EST on the 13th of June 2009. This means that the usual code facebook.com/profile.php?id=abcxyz where abcxyz were numbers will be replaced using an username, and the name is going to be on a first come first serve basis. The name should be at least five characters and include alpha numeric characters eg: facebook.com/first name. This way the search engine will direct you to your face book page first. User profiles created today after 3 pm will not be eligible.

Now users can find you more easily! So visit Facebook.com/username to claim a vanity URL. The URL cannot be changed once selected. So there is definitely going to be a rush with all the millions of face book users to grab names of their choice once they go live tonight especially common names like john brown.

While it opens up lot of opportunities on one hand there seems to be lot of speculations about how users will react to this once face book goes live tonight. It does make connecting easier and compete with other social networks like Twitter but there seems to be concerns about privacy.