Facebook vanity names

Hang on, this is going to be another one of my long story telling posts.

I’m going to at least assume that everyone has heard of Facebook. Two years ago that wouldn’t have been true and I would have had to explain it but I think it’s gone mainstream enough that everyone in the family should know what it is.

I was an early adopter and got into Facebook through kind of a loophole. Facebook was originally set up by some guys at Harvard who originally created it just for their dorm. Pretty soon, they expanded it to the whole campus. Kids at Harvard adopted it so quickly that the founders thought it might catch on at other campuses so within just a few months they expanded to other schools.

Originally, Facebook was somewhat of a closed system. There was a kind of a club atmosphere about it because you could supposedly only join if you were in college and you only could connect with other people on your campus. The way that Facebook controlled it was they would only allow you on if you had an authrorized email address from your school. That’s the loophole that I exploited.

The Penn State Alumni Association has run an email forwarding service for years. Members can sign up for an alumni email address – mine is larryfall@psualum.com. You can then set up that address to forward your emails to whatever your current real email address is. Years ago this was a handy service for recent alums because their email address would often change as they changed jobs.

Somehow, I found out that Facebook was accepting the psualum.com domain as an authorized Penn State address in addition to the university’s psu.edu domain, so I jumped on it. I signed up using Uncle Larry as my name.

One of the earliest things that I did on Facebook was set up an “I have seen Uncle Larry’s Invisible Deck” as a Facebook group. Whenever I would do my invisible deck routine to some students downtown, I would encourage them to sign up for my group even often handing out business cards with the group’s name on it (consider it a form of “personal branding” even before that became a hot buzzwords). I’d add a few people to the group every weekend and I soon got up to around a 100 members or so. I’m sure part of the novelty of joining the group and friending me was the fact that I was an “old guy” on Facebook (for the longest while, I was easily the oldest Penn State guy on Facebook – there were only a couple of people whose class was even within 30 years of mine).

One of the problems with my “Invisible Deck” group was that only people who were on the Penn State Facebook Network could sign up for it. I would often do the trick for someone who was on Facebook but part of another network and they couldn’t join my group. Eventually Facebook solved that problem by creating Global Groups that were open to everyone. At that point I created another “Invisible Deck” group but made it global and started pointing people to that one as the preferred one to join.

In the meantime, Facebook was experiencing explosive growth and they decided to expand beyond colleges. When they did that, I knew that it would take off among the general population to so I signed up for another Facebook account using a non PSU email address and my real name. I figured I’d use the Larry Fall Facebook account for my friends in the real world while continuing the Uncle Larry persona for students that I ran into doing my downtown magic routine.

That worked well and good for a while until Facebook somehow found out that Uncle Larry and Larry Fall were one and the same person. To this day, I’m not sure how they figured that out (you’d think that they would have better things to do). My best guess is that it was part of their campaign to eliminate a lot of the fake accounts that people were setting up. The basically disabled both accounts and contacted me saying that I was violating their terms of condition by maintaining two accounts.

I tried my best to convince them that “Uncle Larry” was a “stage name” that I used doing my “street magic performing art” and that I ought to be allowed to maintain the two accounts. They weren’t buying it. The only thing that I got them to allow me to do was to say that I could continue using “Uncle Larry” but it would have to be under just one account. At that point I had to make a decision and I went with my real name and gave up the “Uncle Larry” account.

Somewhat interestingly, Facebook eventually somewhat embraced the concept of having alternate identities. While they still want everyone to only have one account, they do now allow you to set up PAGES that are connected to your account. What the pages are typically used for are to promote someone’s business – bars and bands being very big. When FB created the Pages concept, I went out and created two that are attached to me – one called “Uncle Larry” and one called “UncleLar”. I did it as placeholders as much as anything. I’ve never built up either page nor have I ever promoted either (still, I can tell from the stats page with the accounts that almost every day someone lands on one or the other pages – whether they are actually looking for ME or not I can’t tell).

This is all background for what I really wanted to talk about. Around a month ago, Facebook announced that they were going to allow members to claim vanity or user names. Previously, if I wanted to direct someone to my Facebook account, I’d have to sent them to a url of something like www.Facebook.com/48535683, something that’s not very user friendly nor easily remembered. With my own defined username, I could tell someone to go to www.Facebook.com/LarryFall or www.Facebook.com/UncleLarry.

One problem though. Again, you could only have ONE username. That meant that I’d have to make a choice between LarryFall, UncleLarry, UncleLar, or whatever else I might come up with. I’d also have to be the first to claim it too. The gold rush for names was scheduled for midnight last night.

I did have one potential out to my dilemma. In addition to allowing vanity names for users, Facebook wisely announced vanity names for the aforementioned PAGES. That meant that I could claim LarryFall for my user name, while also nabbing UncleLarry and UncleLar for my page names.

One catch. however. There was a temporary restriction placed on the Pages. In order to claim a name for your page during the first two weeks of availability, your page would have had to have been created before May 9th (that’s the day that they announced the vanity names function and FB didn’t want people creating a bunch of pages just to grab up vanity names) – no problem for me I was on the Page thing at least a year or so ago, AND the page must have at least 1000 fans – oops, maybe I should have promoted those pages after all. I still had an out though. After two weeks, FB was opening up Pages to all so as long as UncleLarry and UncleLar didn’t get grabbed up early I could still claim them.

So at the witching hour last night, I sat down to claim my vanity name. Not surprisingly, LarryFall was available – and, just to check, so were UncleLar and UncleLarry. Last chance to change my mind (FB says there’s no going back on your decision – what you pick stays with you – they’ll have to figure out what to do about divorcees later).

I actually went with larry.fall as my username. Somewhat interestingly, I discovered this morning that larryfall and larry.fall both redirect to me (as does Larry.Fall etc – evidently capitalization doesn’t matter).

But now comes the bad news. Some jamoke picked UncleLar so I’m not going to be able to grab it in two weeks. Bah hiss. UncleLarry is still available so I’m keeping my fingers crossed. On a face-to-face basis, more people know me as Uncle Larry than UncleLar. On an internet basis, the reverse is true. People on the web know me as UncleLar not Uncle Larry. Oh well, life can’t always be perfect (at least I own UncleLar.com – which btw, I’m finally getting around to doing something with in my spare time).

I am putting up this long winded post for a reason. Facebook is around to stay at least for a while (and probably an eternity in Internet years). I would encourage everyone in the family to go out and join even if they don’t think they will ever use it. You just might change your mind down the road when it will be too late to grab your own name.

As I write this – MarilynBergquist, SteveFall, KenFall, GaryFall, and RonFall are all still available (some of the second generation Falls are already gone – ChrisFall and Shannon Hill for example – although our Chris is friends with the other Chris).

Go get your names!

BTW – it’s a good way to connect with old friends like from high school. There are 25 people from my HS graduating class on Facebook. Marilyn – there are 44 from your class some of whom’s names l recognize like Lindy, Steve Breffit, Marilyn Shriver, etc. Steve and Ken – there are 57 from each of your classes. Ron and Gary – I don’t remember your graduation years so you’re on your own.