So the goldrush is almost over and most of you may have secured your own vanity URLs on Facebook by now.

I first tried facebook.com/amit but it threw up an error saying that the minimum length of usernames is 5 characters. So the new URLs of my Facebook pages are:

• facebook.com/digital.inspiration - Digital Inspiration
• facebook.com/agarwal.amit - Personal profile

The similarity between Gmail & Facebook usernames

The period (”.”) in your Facebook username is actually meaningless because you can place it anywhere in the URL or even remove it from the username and your Facebook Vanity URL will still work.

So facebook.com/digital.inspiration is the same as facebook.com/digitalinspiration or facebook.com/di.gitalinsp.iration (notice this has multiple periods).

Gmail too cannot recognize dots or periods in email addresses so an an address like paris.hilton@gmail.com is the same as paris.hi.lton@gmail.com or paris…hilton@gmail.com.

And here’s a quick screencast video (link) that captures my failed attempt at securing a short URL on Facebook.