I thought Anil's piece was hilarious. However, I think he and others have missed out on the significance of the 'URL on facebook' as opposed to the 'real domain

I thought Anil's piece was hilarious. However, I think he and others have missed out on the significance of the 'URL on facebook' as opposed to the 'real domain that you can own'. The reason that people are excited it about it is because it's starting from scratch. That is, I may actually have the chance to get a username like 'scott' or 'sdt' rather than scott-siliconvalley94043. Since facebook is already a fairly canonical place to go for personal contact info, interests, etc, this is fairly huge. The other important bit is that because facebook is a fairly canonical reference point, and it has very good search rankings, having your name established is going to be important. If some random 6th cousin of mine got the facebook.com/my.full.name and started ranking higher than my personal site for googling "my full name", I'd be pretty pissed. Of course, nobody really knows how Google is going to treat these vanity URLs.