The Real McCrea

Identity is a critical component of the emerging Social Web. Tonight, Facebook opened up what will likely be one of the most important namespaces, allowing their 200+ milion users around the world to choose a username and secure their “vanity URL”.

“The Real McCrea” was there for the countdown, eager to participate in the historic moment — and hellbent on grabbing “johnmccrea” before any of the many others out there with *my* name. Like the lead singer for the band Cake. Or the famous comic book illustrator (who got the domain johnmccrea.com before me).

The team at Facebook had apparently prepared well for the land grab, as they were able to handle the massive spike without any apparent glitches. (Apparently, 500,000 usernames were grabbed in the first 15 minutes.) As for me, I had secured “johnmccrea” within 30 seconds. Major kudos an congrats to the team at Facebook!

Also, a shout out to my partner, Joseph Smarr, who, on the evening of his promotion to CTO of Plaxo, couldn’t help himself from digging into and patching the code for Plaxo’s online identifiers, so that anyone could add their shiny new Facebook vanity URL to the “me on the web” section of their Plaxo public profile. So, when you visit mine, at johnmccrea.myplaxo.com (yes, we’ve had vanity URLs for a while), you’ll now see:

Sweet!

Claim your Facebook username now.