Yesterday, Facebook staff posted an announcement on the company blog regarding the unlocking of Facebook usernames or “vanity URLs.” Now, instead of going to facebook.com/profile.php?id=7901458, starting this weekend, you could visit facebook.com/cesart (or whatever name I choose on Friday night) to write on my wall and view pictures I’ve uploaded.

This is huge for social networking. Not only does it make Facebook more semantic and easier for people to use, but it also adds a new level of interaction between users—assuming people start to use Facebook more like Twitter.

From the announcement:

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.

I imagine two situations occurring:

1. People who link their Twitter accounts to their Facebook accounts (like me) will see increased use of the @ symbol in things like Facebook comments or any other time there is need to reference another user—there will be demand to link to the profiles when someone’s username is mentioned;
2. people who don’t merge Twitter and Facebook will begin to use the @ syntax, further blurring the lines between Facebook and Twitter.

My advice, and this is what I’m planning to do, is to make sure you’re happy with your Twitter account username since that’s always editable. Come Friday night, make your Twitter and Facebook usernames match, because (as stated in the username FAQ) once you lock in your Facebook name, there’s no going back; your online identity will be set.

EDIT: I indeed ended up with facebook.com/cesart. Let’s be friends (that is of course, if we already have met in real life)!

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(view full-size version on my Flickr stream)

I kept my 2G around, so I still qualify for the price points announced at the keynote earlier this afternoon, but I feel really bad for anyone trying to upgrade from a 3G. Not cool. :\

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On the night of March 11th, 2009, I logged into my Facebook account and was met with the home page redesign. I’ve been holding off on writing any commentary on the subject until I fully experienced the entire update (save the above status update as soon as I logged in). At first, the amount of information I had to parse was overwhelming on top of trying to navigate a new layout—which seems to be everyone’s issue at the moment. I logged out and instead opted to focus my attention on SXSW (i.e.: interacting with internet friends IRL).

Now that I’ve had some time to use the service post-hangover and had really informative discussions with Nirav and Trey, I really like what Facebook has done.

Back in December 2007, when Facebook introduced Friend Lists, I had no idea how relevant they would be fifteen months later. I used lists at first only because the option was there whenever I approved a friend request. Later on, I found it easy to use my lists to populate the “To” field for Facebook event invitations. The utility in compiling lists seemed to end there—until a few weeks ago.

If you’ve created lists or not, your left-most navigation will look similar to what’s on the left, with the News Feed filter set as the default. Facebook will present you with default Network filters immediately below the global News Feed category, so you can try out the interactions with those if you haven’t created any lists yet. The News Feed is a global update of the content and interactions with everyone on your friends list, including Public Profiles (e.g.: LIGHTS).

The large amount of content is what initially drove me crazy until I figured out you can minimize your content overload by creating a Friends List. Whatever list is at the top of the navigation is your default (you can set a default simply by dragging a list to the top).

Once you have a few lists set up for different groups of people that you can quickly click around, you will easily see the beauty of the redesign. These granular filters have let me weed out the content that I really don’t care to see and let the content that’s important to me be frontmost. I should add that these filters aren’t just for people, but also content and external applications like Photos, Videos, Notes, Links, Flickr and FriendFeed.

I think there are still some weird UI/UX and layout issues (like editing lists or placement of Birthdays and Pokes), but it seems every time I log in, I see things getting shifted around. (As an aside, I think these information blocks on the right should be modular since it seems there are disparate preferences as to where they should go.) If there’s something that Facebook has always done well (whether users initially liked it or not), it’s having stellar layouts and being receptive to user feedback. They won’t renege on the design as a whole, but they do listen.

Facebook is creating a product for 200 million users (as of this month)—a redesign is never going to please everyone. With more and more content coming through your News Feed and more and more people signing up for the service by the hour, I think this is a great way to manage that amount of videos, pokes, photos, status updates, imported blog entries, imported Twitter messages and other seemingly endless amounts of digital jetsam cannoned from your iPhone.

Go create a Friends List—prioritizing friends has never felt so good.

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I recently came across an article that listed the “99 Essential Twitter Tools and Applications.” Normally, I try to stay away from posts of this nature, but I was compelled by the title.

I figured it would be easy to get a quick percentage, if I included Twitter itself in the mix, of how many of these tools and apps be some hack on the word “twitter,” “tweet” or the “tw-” prefix?

In a largely un-scientific study, 89 of the 100 sites listed appropriated variations on the Twitter name (again, I included Twitter themselves in the mix—maybe unfair, but it makes for a nicer looking graphic).

In bringing this discovery up publicly, I want to caution the creators of Twitter apps on relying on the Twitter brand name so heavily when it comes to naming their products (for more than just legal reasons). The micro-blogging service has made it really easy for developers to tap into their API and create some amazing products as a result and leverage the ever-growing number of users that the service has seen.

We all know Twitter isn’t going anywhere. If you’re trying to create a micro-product that leverages the connections people have accumulated on their Twitter social graph or the messaging aspects of the service, you are not going to stand out from the crowd. The very fact that Smashing Magazine could even aggregate 99 sub-services for an article should be a testament to how many offerings are already out there—and Twitter is only three years old this month.

It may seem easy and cutesy to try and create a product that leverages the Twitter name, but spend as much time thinking about the name as you think about your databases and your monetization strategy. I guarantee you will stand out and you’ll have a brand name that is more scalable in the long run.

Just to disclose, I am the designer behind Friend Or Follow, a site featured in the Smashing Magazine article linked above—and Dusty Reagan was the one who came up with the name. Stay tuned to my articles by subscribing to the RSS feed in your favorite RSS reader or by following me on Twitter.

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Video by Kevin Twohy.

Last year was my first time attending SXSW in my own backyard of Austin, TX. My slight obsessions with indie rock and technology notwithstanding, it’s a wonder I haven’t been going to the conference for a while now (going to school in Austin lent itself to fleeing the city for the beach whenever Spring Break rolled around).

Now with two years to my name and a few good nights of sleep, I finally have some time to reflect on year two and to draw some comparison between my two attendances of the conference.

Many previous attendees were noticeably absent, arrived late or departed Austin early, but I did find that this was many people’s first time at the conference (Austin’s own tech culture writer Omar Gallaga points out the increase as about 25% over last year). Once the events were in full swing, however, engaging discussions happened in the panels, in the hallways between panels and especially at the hordes of notorious official and unofficial after-parties.

Aggregating so many brilliant minds in one proverbial room is the biggest draw for attending the Interactive portion of the conference—the free-flowing booze isn’t too bad either, as Owen Thomas sardonically pointed out from a distance in an article on Valleywag (he was one attendee who was noticeably absent).

Many of the conference panels centered around the topics of monetization and formulating solid business models (obvious topics considering current economic conditions), amongst usual topics for a technology conference in Texas (barbecue).

My biggest takeaways with the panels centered around the future of the web and the potential involvement it has in our lives in the coming years.

One panel in particular about NUIs (natural user-interfaces) particularly struck a chord as one of the more foretelling presentations. The preponderance of computers in personal computers and mobile devices could very well move into conventional appliances (that’s right, toasters and dishwashers). The panelists were quick to point out that while the iPhone has been pivitol in introducing a touchscreen device to the masses, NUIs are about more than providing a touch interface (there is still a keyboard, albeit a janky one, present on iPhone).

Panels on mobile and location-based services also postulated on the future of the popularity of those specific technologies. These services (BrightKite, Moximity, etc.) are getting better and better and are as relevant as ever with the growing popularity of mobile device computing. Absent from the panel, however, was a presence from Foursquare, the year’s virtual toy of choice, which launched hours after the first real world check-ins at downtown hotels. Some were lucky enough to be part of the conference-wide game of Assasins a few of us started here in Austin (probably my favorite part of the conference); the game is sure to be a tradition for years to come (unless someone tries to appropriate the hype).

All in all, a great time and way too much experience to try and distill into words. If you’ve never attended the conference, make sure you do in 2010. I promise it’s worth it; a few hundred dollars and a few hours of lost sleep totally make up for the amount of great people you meet, the amount of free food and alcohol you can get and most importantly, the amount of raw creative energy you walk away with (well, once you sleep in a few times). See you in ‘10!

PS: Even if PureVolume.com changes the name of it’s douchey party next year (this year it was “The House,” last year, “The Ranch”), it’s the only place open after 2AM, still serving up free drinks. Irritation aside, I still pwnd that line like nobody’s business. ;)

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