facebook usernames opened up for the grabs at 12:00 AM Saturday, July 13th, 2009.

With 200+ Million users in facebook, you should probably hurry up if you want to grab your preferred username before someone else does forever! Once they have been taken, they are gone for good!  facebook stated that usernames dropped by other users in the future, will not be recycled – for security reasons.

Some “rules” I did see posted:  the username must have at least 5 characters, dots are allowed. New accounts registered after the first announcement about the usernames was made ( just a few days ago by email to all users), will not be eligible for getting one of these usernames, to avoid current users from creating new accounts / extra accounts – just to grab another name…

…Of course, of the 53 “Gustavo Olmedo” guys on facebook – WHO DO YOU THINK GOT “GustavoOlmedo” ?????  Are you kidding me?

…Just got facebook username “GustavoOlmedo” at 1 AM – just an hour after opening – so my URL there is:  http://www.facebook.com/GustavoOlmedo

I admit that my Last Name is not even too common – even less when combined with my First Name – yet, there were 53 “Gustavo Olmedo” guys / “facebookers” – acording to the facebook search results when I searched today out of curiosity!

I don’t know how fast these usernames will go, but it’s maybe around these numbers: 1 out of 100 to 150 people per every combination of Name + Last Name (rough estimate according a few searches of common names and not-so-common name combinations – but of course, there are lots of users that never came back for over a year – after they first created their account = even more chances to you).

Who knows, depending on how common Your Name + Last Name combination is, you might have a few days, since some facebook users log into their account once a week or even less often, but if you wait to long you might have to settle forever with a “not-so-cute” name!  So why wait and take the risk? (unless you do not care about a shorter / “prettier” URL to your profile – like some people don’t).

…Sorry my friend, but if your name is something like:

“John Smith”, “Sarah Davis”, “Steve Johnson”, “Jose Garcia”, “Juan Perez” or “Maria Rodriguez”, etc. – GOOOOOOD LUUUUUUCK to Ya’ !!!

(Here you can see the most common “surnames” in the U.S.A.)

So, HURRY! Grab your preferred username fast!  There are 200+ Million facebookers hungry for a nice username of their choice. You don’t want to end up having to grab something like:

“http://facebook.com/leftOver$ProcrastrinatorShOOT123″

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^facebook.com V.S. myspace.com at Compete.com Traffic Data (04/2008 – 04/2009)

Even though this has already been coming along in progress for a while, some public traffic data (estimates) show how facebook.com has been catching up with myspace.com in the last year. But specifically on May of 2009, some interesting numbers have resulted for the last 12 months of data:

The results for April 2008 to April 2009 for what is known as “Unique Visitors” (including an image from Compete.com), show how facebook.com has gone from about half the traffic of myspace.com – to nearly double the traffic – in the last 12 months!

Those of you who have used Compete.com and know that the data is estimated very different to what is gathered directly from a server, you should already know that numbers in Compete.com are significatly lower than the actual traffic – and not so accurate (real numbers can expected to be 3.5 to 4 times higher than what shows in compete.com, but still can vary up or down from that).

However, for the purpose of this comparison, we are “comparing apples to apples”, since we are using the same system to compare websites – so keep in mind that the ratios of the data would then be relative.

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I have to admit that twitter.com is a great concept, but with 25 people in their staff and diverse areas of talent, there are no excuses for still not having fixed the bug for weeks for the Profile Picture Upload feature and the profile Design Settings.

I have created 3 accounts for different sides of the business, and have had issues every time.

With 3 different browsers that I have tried:  Firefox = ERROR!, Google Chrome = ERROR!, and even with the sucky Internet Explorer = ERROOOOORRRR!

It is very upsetting that after I have carefuly selected my colors for the Design Settings to customize my twitter page – and even uploaded an image, after clicking on the “save settings” button, it reports  and ERROR saying:

“There was a problem saving your profile customization.”

…and the same goes for the profile Picture upload feature. I choose an image of only 5KB and after uploading it, it reports an error, and it even dares to have a generic message come up saying:

“There was a problem with your picture. Probably too big.” ..5k too big???

When they even state there “Maximum size of 700k. JPG, GIF, PNG.”

…And by the way, it happened with all accepted formats (JPG, GIF, PNG.) – tested repeatedly and will the major browsers repeatedly too, but all having the same outcome!

So after trying for my new account at twitter, and getting error after error, I had to just leave my profile / page like it comes when you sign up and just keep waiting for them to fix it, so I will try later but the colors in it are totally not what I was looking for. I had all the colors to match this blog but “no dice” with them.

They know about these issues, and they have posted about it in their help section and FAQ section. But a few weeks down the road – nothing gets fixed. I understand if it is a website that is being run by 1 guy = then you have al excuses in the world to even never fix bugs, but 25 people in a staff?  Idon’t think there are any excuses, unless…

Are the 25+ employees working out of the cafeteria?

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