Several years on and we still have to deal with the fact that we cannot have good names for our URLs ("vanity URL" or "custom URL" or whatever else you'd want t

Several years on and we still have to deal with the fact that we cannot have good names for our URLs ("vanity URL" or "custom URL" or whatever else you'd want to call it). Want to share your profile with others? Here's a Google+ link with a long string of digits at the end. Want to share your Google+ community's link with others? Here's another Google+ link with a long string of digits at the end. Want to share your Google+ page's link? Here's yet another Google+ link with a long string of digits at the end. Want to shorten these links? Use the built-in shortener and get a shortened-yet-gibberish-like-link. Want to simplify these links for sharing using meaningful names in the URL so people can actually remember it? Oh, then just use bit.ly (or another better URL shortener) and create a custom one with whatever name you like (assuming it's available on bit.ly)! How hard is it to provide custom URLs? Does it cost Google millions of dollars to do this? Does it make maintenance of Google+ a lot more expensive? Facebook provides custom names to be used in URLs for one's profile, for pages, and for groups (first come first served and all that, of course). On Google+ you can do this for your profile (?) after you meet some primitive pre-conditions. For something that's supposedly social, I'm deeply disappointed with how Google+ has been developed (read neglected) over time. I like some aspects of G+ (like the layout, font, font sizes, etc.), but two things that are grating are the lack of custom URLs and the unintuitive navigation scheme (compared to Facebook). I still post to G+ once in a while (although, there's really no audience there) and look for improvements with the hope that I can start nudging people away from Facebook and get more traction on an alternative platform (another walled garden, but at least not as evil, IMO). It's sad, for me, that even long wait times don't show much for progress. If the strategy seemed convoluted while Vic Gundotra was managing it, his departure left the platform languishing as if it were a part time project. Anyone from the Google+ team reading this - firstly, please bring in basic stuff to the platform that's important for people to share, and secondly, please copy Facebook shamelessly in whatever it's doing well for user experience. Lastly, thanks a lot for (reverting to and) retaining the freedom of users to use pseudonyms on the platform!