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Why does my new Facebook map to multiple vanity addresses?


My new facebook vanity address is http://www.facebook.com/alastairclark

I chose this out of geeky pride of eagerly waiting for the right time to fill out the form before anyone else. My common username as my friends know is “Clarkalastair” as in this blog address, and I felt that putting in a point like “Alastair.Clark” I would be deviating too much from my normal, so I clicked “Choose my own username” and entered this rather than going with the default.

However if you now type in http://www.facebook.com/alastair.clark it also goes to my profile. In fact as noted by one of my twitter friends @1Rick any number of full stops (or periods to give the Americanism) can be included and still point to my profile. E.g. http://www.facebook.com/a.l.a.s….ta.ir.c…la.r.k

This to me signifies one of two things. Either the service has a default match for usernames with decimal points in (which seems reasonable) or a huge bug in their system. Either way I’m eagerly awaiting to see what happens when someone else registers my name with a decimal point.

This entry was posted on June 13, 2009, 2:38 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  1. #1 by Steven K on June 14, 2009 - 4:53 am

    I would expect it to be deliberate. In the same that google ignore dots in their usernames http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=10313#

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  2. #2 by Alastair on June 17, 2009 - 9:21 pm

    Thanks for that. I agree with you. It does seem deliberate. Good for me I suppose :-) not so good for other Alastair Clarks in this world :-)

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