The Facebook username landrush appears to have gone off largely without a hitch. Over half a million usernames were registered in the first 15 minutes after the floodgates were opened, and several million usernames have been registered so far today (3 million as of 11am PT this morning). Few users reported having any technical issues with the site – congratulations to the team at Facebook on a very smooth launch!

We’ve seen some interesting cases of vanity URLs that have been registered so far:

• Many users have been coming up with clever user names that look like they could be system files on Facebook, like Christine Shipley snagged facebook.com/default.aspx in the first few minutes, and Eric Luu followed suit with facebook.com/index. Facebook’s actual home page is located at facebook.com/home.php.
• Others have found very good generic domain names for popular search terms. For example, Adriana Brown registered facebook.com/cheaphotels and Tom Fotheringham nabbed facebook.com/cheapcruises. Attorney Trey Branham chose facebook.com/mesothelioma, one of the highest priced PPC keywords on Google
• Some users have been able to register offensive usernames as well.

It will be interesting to see if Facebook allows these names to live on – Facebook has built a team to make sure the vanity URLs that are registered are authentic. Some users have already reported having the usernames they registered being taken away. The next couple weeks are likely to be pretty messy as Facebook encounters gray area after gray area when it comes to username allocation. You can learn more about the rules Facebook has set up for vanity URLs for Pages specifically here.

Regardless, all those who’ve chosen new usernames will notice their profile page URL switch instantaneously.  Expect to start seeing many more vanity URLs floating around in the coming weeks and months.

Facebook username registration opens for the firs time in just a few hours, marking a major milestone in Facebook identity. For the first time since Facebook began over 5 years ago, users will be able to choose a username to go by on the site. And while it may not be clear today how broadly Facebook usernames will be used in the future, everyone should be careful to pick a username that they will want to be associated with their real Facebook identity for years to come.

Here’s how the username allocation process will work:

• Starting at 12:01am EDT tonight (4:01am GMT on 13 June), Facebook users can choose a username on this page. The names will be available on a first-come, first-serve basis.
  
• Once a name is chosen, Facebook says it can never be changed or transferred – it will be your Facebook username and URL forever. So you should choose a name that you’ll be comfortable associating with yourself for the rest of your life.
• Usernames must be at least 5 characters long, and will only be available in Roman characters at launch.
• Facebook has restricted a lot of generic and trademarked usernames – so you won’t be able to pick “InNOut,” “GeorgeBush,” or “Mesothelioma.”
• If you created your account after June 9, 2009, at 3pm PT, you’ll have to wait until June 28 to get your username.

In addition, Facebook has set up several rules for businesses interested in getting vanity URLs for their Facebook Pages. Only those Pages with more than 1,000 fans on May 31 will be eligible for usernames starting tonight. The rest will also have to wait until June 28.

Facebook chose to start the username landrush at midnight on a Friday night in the US to ease the transition on its internal systems and processes. Europeans probably have the toughest time though – they’ll be getting up at (or staying up until) 4-5am to get their Facebook username.

Good luck getting the name you want!

Earlier this year, we first covered the news that Facebook had filed a federal lawsuit against famed “Spam King” Sanford Wallace, Adam Arzoomanian, and Scott Shaw for crimes under the CAN-SPAM Act, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and the California Anti-Phishing Act. Today, Facebook says Judge Jeremy Fogel ruled in US District Court in San Jose that the case will proceed.

Wallace, making an unusual personal court appearance, filed for bankruptcy this morning. Nevertheless, Facebook, which has been fighting a number of phishing attacks and scams in recent months, says it intends to fully pursue Wallace and his associates. It sounds like Facebook wants to make a visible example out of Wallace as a deterrent against future scammers.

Wallace’s bankruptcy filing “is not unexpected and only delays our judgment temporarily,” a Facebook spokesperson told us. “We will continue to pursue the judgment and will be reviewing his filing very closely.”

“We see Fogel’s ruling as a strong deterrent against spammers. Spammers feel that they are immune from criminal prosecution. Fogel’s ruling demonstrates that judges will enforce restraining orders and spammers who violate them face criminal prosecution. This appears to have had an impact on Wallace who was in court today. To our knowledge, he has not appeared in any of the many previous cases against him.”

This is not the first time Wallace or Arzoomanian have been accused of malicious marketing practices on social networks. In May of 2008, MySpace won a $234 million judgment against Wallace and business partner Walter Rines for illegal spam and phishing attacks against MySpace users. Wallace has been actively building his “Spam King” reputation since 1997, having been charged with various federal crimes over the last decade.

Facebook’s original complaint, filed February 24, 2009, is embedded below.

Last fall, Facebook helped get out the vote on election day in the United States with a special home page promotion in which over 2 million people shared with their friends that they’d voted on Facebook. The rally helped spread messages to millions more Americans that encouraged them to take part in US national elections themselves.

Today, Facebook is doing the same thing on national election day in Iran. Facebook is showing a home page message to all users in Iran which says, “Today is Election Day in Iran” with an “I voted” button and a counter.  Clicking “I voted” will increment the counter and pop open a form that gives users the option to share a message with their friends that indicates they voted, giving the voting message viral distribution.

So far, over 12,400 supporters of both Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his chief rival, Mir Hossain Moussavi, have participated. Facebook says it’s likely to do similar campaigns in other countries for future elections. No word yet on what percentage of Facebook users are advocating for Ahmadinejad vs. Moussavi, though pro-Moussavi groups and pages have had more members to date.

“Facebook’s features for connecting and communicating naturally support political discussions and organizing.  We think the democratic process is important so we’re making special efforts to foster participation,” Facebook’s Barry Schnitt says. “We’ve done this in the US and now in Iran.  We hope to do the same thing for more elections going forward.”

Facebook’s United States election day promotion on November 4, 2008:

The Facebook username landrush starts tonight at 12:01am EDT, and with it comes potentially the best one-time opportunity for businesses to improve their Facebook identity and SEO by getting a good Facebook vanity URL.

However, as many Page owners have discovered, if your Facebook Page has less than 1,000 fans or was created after May 31, your Page won’t be eligible to get a vanity URL starting tonight. Instead, Facebook says you’ll have to wait until Sunday, June 28 to get a vanity URL for your Page.

Why is Facebook enforcing this rule? Essentially, to mitigate squatting. Facebook wants to make sure every vanity URL that gets registered in the system is authentic, and has put these restrictions in place to prevent speculators from creating thousands of Pages in order to squat on vanity URLs. However, this rule will delay legitimate Page owners with less than 1,000 fans from getting a vanity URL for two weeks as well.

As we detailed earlier this week, Facebook has set up several rules to try to ensure the vanity URL landrush goes as smoothly as possible:

• Facebook is not allowing Page owners to choose generic vanity URLs. The most SEO-able usernames are those that most closely match frequently searched terms, like “flowers” or “pizza.” However, Facebook says that generic words are not available as usernames at this time. Rather, Facebook “encourages all users and Page administrators to create a username that closely matches the true identity of their name or business.”
• Facebook is not allowing Page owners to change or transfer usernames/URLs. Once you pick a username for your page, that’s your page’s username forever – so pick one you’re going to like for the long term. This also means that it will be harder for a black market around usernames to develop.
• Facebook is allowing rights holders to prevent their trademarks from being registered as usernames. If you own a trademark that you want to prevent others from registering as their Facebook username, Facebook has created this form that you can fill out to file the request.

For more comprehensive details and best practices on marketing with Facebook Pages, check out our industry leading Facebook Marketing Bible.

Facebook has been using its “Suggestions” area of the home page to recommend friends you may know for a while now (and more recently, suggested public profiles you may like). While Facebook has traditionally calculated its list of “People You May Know” by analyzing the social graph – choosing friends of friends, etc. – many users have started noticing this week that Facebook appears to be suggesting people not because they’re friends of friends, but because their contact records were imported using Facebook’s “Find People You Email” feature at some point in the past.

This apparent change in the Suggestions algorithm has some users concerned because, if those imported contacts were indeed stored, Facebook didn’t make it clear that they were doing so at the time. Facebook’s contact importer page says that “Facebook will not store your password,” but it doesn’t say whether or not Facebook retains imported contacts for future use.

When asked if Facebook is incorporating imported contacts into the Suggestions feature, Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly told us, “We are constantly iterating on the algorithm that we use to determine the Suggestions section of the home page.  We do not share details about the algorithm itself.”

Nevertheless, concerned users say they are “spooked” by the appearance of people they emailed years ago on their Facebook home page.

If Facebook is indeed storing imported contacts for the purposes of future friend suggestions, it should make that more clear. Because Facebook appears to only be using that information to make helpful friend suggestions, most users would not be concerned. Facebook generally has very high standards when it comes to user privacy, and not giving users the choice to not have their imported contacts saved isn’t worth “spooking” users who don’t want to see people they’ve emailed in the past showing up in their suggested friends list in the future.

Facebook has begun cracking down on owners of generic Pages tonight, removing stream publishing privileges for many Pages with over 500,000 fans. Owners who log into their Page administration console will see the above notice that their publishing rights have been blocked “due to a violation of the Pages Terms of Use.”

In addition to not being able to publish to the stream, these Page owners are also unable to send updates to fans. In other words, all outbound communication channels have been cut off. However, Page owners are still able to moderate the discussion board, install applications, and manage page photos and other information.

This news should stifle the budding marketplace for generic Pages with lots of fans. Two weeks ago, OraBrush bought the Kisses page and its 1.1 million fans for an undisclosed sum, and others have been building Page networks as well. However, Facebook’s actions tonight have rendered many of those Pages more like glorified Groups than vehicles for pumping content into the Facebook stream.

We all knew it was coming. Facebook’s intention with Pages is that they be a product for brands, businesses, and public figures – not speculative marketing channels. Its terms of service prohibit “fake” and “unofficial” Pages, and many generic Pages fall in the “bumper sticker” category that Facebook Groups have served in for so long.

Facebook marketers looking for the right way to reach people inside Facebook should start thinking differently than ammassing a network of generic Pages. Pages are a place for official brands and their agents to engage Facebook users – and still offer significant opportunity for those acting in an official capacity.

As we continue our discussions with this year’s 2009 fbFund REV winners, we now turn to Navify, an online collaborative encyclopedia that complements Wikipedia articles with images, videos, and comments. We recently spoke with Alan Rutledge, Founder of Navify, on his vision of creating an online encyclopedia that the world can illustrate together.

Inside Facebook: Alan, what’s the problem that Navify addresses?

Alan Rutledge: Wikipedia is a vibrant community. What would Wikipedia look like with complementary media forms? I was fed up with going to a movie article on Wikipedia and not being able to watch the trailer. I’m a very visual person, and so whenever I went on Wikipedia to read up on a topic, there would be no pictures; and I had no idea how to visualize the concept. Basically, we’re adding a rich multimedia layer on top of Wikipedia so you don’t have to go to YouTube, for example, in addition to Wikipedia to get related videos.

You seem to have a lot of entrepreneurial experiences under your belt already. What were you doing before Navify?

I was raised in an entrepreneurial environment. My dad used to run the engineering school at Caltech. I began working at startups in high school. At Idealab, I worked on projects related to alternative energy, sterling engines, getting rid of Internet cables, robots, etc. Before doing consulting at BCG, I worked at Microsoft and a mobile photo sharing startup that was bought out by iLike.

Who’s on the Navify team?

I work with two other buddies. We’re a very tiny overworked team right now.

So, what’s your relationship with Wikipedia?

You can use Wikipedia with attribution. Answers.com is a $30 million company that builds content around specific questions. For each answer, it pulls content from Wikipedia. Similarly, with Navify, our platform is possible with YouTube and Flickr’s APIs. At the same time, we’re not trying to substitute Wikipedia; in fact, we drive traffic back to Wikipedia.

How do users interact with Navify right now?

Navify is currently divided into two partitions. The first partition is human edited and is pretty empty right now because we launched only several days ago. The second partition is algorithmic and will always be populated with content. Users can move content, videos for example, back and forth between the human-edited and algorithmic partitions. There’s more noise with the algorithmic one, but with the human-edited one, users are picking and organizing content in meaningful ways.

Notice the Images and Videos tabs next to the Wikipedia article, as well as Comments to the right.

Richer media forms are a must in today’s Internet culture. Why hasn’t Wikipedia integrated them into its platform yet?

Wikipedia has a strict stance of neutrality. It’s hesitant to integrate with other sites because its community wants to remain neutral. But, in the last two years, most sites have opened their APIs, and the concept of the web as a platform has only begun to capture the public’s mind. Unlike Wikipedia, we plan to operate as a for-profit business. The key will be to find forms of monetization that are useful for end users – like how Google’s sponsored links are providing actual utility to users.

And, how are you leveraging the Facebook Platform on your own platform?

We already have Facebook Connect. In addition to images and videos, we’re building a vibrant reader community around topics of discussion by allowing Navify users to leave comments on articles (via Disqus), which Wikipedia doesn’t do. A Facebook integration comes in handy because your real identity is tied to your comments, which gives you incentive to leave higher quality comments; there are higher social costs to leaving meaningless comments. Contrast this to YouTube: its comment trail is like a bathroom wall. We also support OpenID and Twitter.

Now that you’re in public beta, what trends have you noticed in user behavior?

People like the Related Articles box. They sit and click on articles. It becomes addictive.

Are there any other players in your space?

The closest analogy to what we’re doing is FriendFeed, which provides a search and browse experience to let their users share more easily online. None of the content on FriendFeed is original, but users can build discussions around them.

What are your expectations for this summer’s fbFund REV incubator program?

I’m keeping my mind open.

Thanks Alan! Any final thoughts?

One thing I’ll leave you with is that we’re working on a collaborative encyclopedia for the world to illustrate and make more useful for each other. Navify isn’t just a product, it’s a belief. We’re illustrating the world’s knowledge.

Although Facebook and Google are rivals on multiple fronts, YouTube announced today that it has just launched Facebook Connect integration, making it easy to autoshare uploaded videos with Facebook friends.

Now, after you authenticate with Facebook on YouTube, YouTube will automatically post a link to videos you upload on Facebook. The integration should boost traffic sent back to YouTube from Facebook as well – in the case of other Facebook Connect implementations, each shared item has generated up to 30 clicks back to the Connect-enabled site.

This actually isn’t the first time Facebook Connect has been integrated on YouTube. Two months ago, Coca Cola Europe’s Green Eyed World campaign manged to launch with a custom Facebook Connect integration on YouTube. That effort went very well.

The YouTube integration marks another major partner launch for Facebook Connect in June. Last week, Microsoft announced the integration of Facebook Connect on Xbox Live and Nintendo announced integration on its DSi handheld at E3 in Los Angeles.

Since Facebook launched the new version of Facebook Pages a couple of months ago, interest in Pages as a way to engage Facebook users with branded or commercial content has surged. Now, thousands of marketers are figuring out how to grow their Page’s fan base and get the most out of their Facebook audience.

One company, however, has been taking a slightly different approach. Washington, DC-based PageReach – which until now has been operating in stealth mode – has quietly been assembling a network of topic-based public profiles with the intention of building the first “content network” built solely on Pages.

Founder Dan Birdwhistell says PageReach has built a network of 75 Pages that reach over 10 million fans overall so far. One of the largest is The Beach, with over 2.7 million fans.

While many entrepreneurs have been thinking about Pages primarily as a way to gain access to user’s home page streams, Birdwhistell says he sees a difference between the idea of becoming a fan and subscribing to a feed.

“In general, most users become a fan of something as an additional way to articulate their identity.  For instance, someone may become a fan of ‘Pizza,’ but they don’t necessarily want to receive content from the Pizza page in their feed,” Birdwhistell says. “For users, the Pages product gives them an awesome interface (much better than Groups) to share content and connect with other like-minded users. We launched PageReach to build content and paired applications for these interest groups.”

Instead of relying purely on stream updates, PageReach is intending to monetize its Page network through a combination of sponsorships, seeding campaigns, applications developed specifically for its Page network. For example, the company has created a custom tatoo-themed application for its Tatoos page.

“Our Tattoos Page has about 1.45mm subscribers. To build more value for the user on top of our daily content and Stream posts, we built the Tattoo Gallery application to enable them to upload, rate, and browse tattoos by placement and theme.   We plan on extending this page/application model to many of our fashion, hobby, and entertainment pages,” Birdwhistell says.

In addition, PageReach hopes to help other branded Page owners jumpstart their pages by providing promotional “seeding” services to get other Pages over the initial 1,000 fan hump.

The Future of Generic Facebook Pages

PageReach is one of the first companies experimenting with building a business on top of generic, interest-based Facebook Pages. However, because Facebook’s original intention for Pages was to serve as a vehicle for official brands and companies, the future of these Pages is somewhat unclear. Facebook’s terms of service says, “Fake Pages and unofficial ‘fan pages’ are a violation of our Terms of Use,” so it’s quite possible the company will at least impose some restrictions on generic pages in the future.

We’ll of course let you know how things unfold. For now, PageReach has built one of the largest networks of Facebook Pages, and is continuing to expand it every day.

Statistics for PageReach’s Tatoos Page – Note the Gender and Geographic Breakdown

Landing Page Views for Various Pages in the PageReach Network (the highest is around 75k/day)