It seems after all the warnings from Facebook that once you choose a username for your profile you’re stuck with it forever, Facebook have now quietly added the ability for you to change it.
To change your profile’s username, go to Settings > Account Settings, and next to Username, click Change.
“Choose your new username carefully. You can only change your username once.” it warns.
Annoyingly, it does not allow you to change the formatting of your current username, such as the capitalization of letters or the location of dots. Because capital letters and dots do not make a username unique, when you click “Check Availability” it checks against all current usernames and reports that it’s not available because someone is already using it: you. Hopefully Facebook fixes this issue in the future.
Facebook suggests that when choosing a username you should “make sure it is something you like and that it’s appropriate for friends, family, co-workers, and anyone else who might use it to find you.”
Will you be changing your username?
If you have a Facebook account and are tired of having to tell all your friends and strangers you meet on the street to visit you at http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=847O63782 or whatever, things are about to change. At 12:01 am Eastern Standard Time this coming Saturday, 13 June (5:01 am in the UK), you will be able to sign up for something a bit more manageable, say, http://www.facebook.com/joetheplumber.
As detailed on the Facebook blog, “Your new Facebook URL is like your personal destination, or home, on the Web. People can enter a Facebook username as a search term on Facebook or a popular search engine like Google, for example, which will make it much easier for people to find friends with common names.”
Gone are the days when you would meet people at a party or club or bus stop and have to find a pen to write on their arm your randomly assigned nine-digit Facebook member code. Now it’s easy–you can just tell the world that you are “‘joetheplumber’–no spaces–on Facebook!”
The company calls these personalised names “Facebook usernames”. For people worried about privacy, we are assured that “[y]our username will have the same privacy setting as your profile name in Search, and you can always edit your search privacy settings.”
But you’ll have to hurry if you want to get Facebook to do for you what MySpace and other social-networking sites have done for some time. Barack Obama got in early (as did many other non-ordinary citizens and businesses). His Facebook username? barackobama, of course!
The last thing you’d want is to lose your preferred vanity URL to someone else in the stampede.
