Facebook custom 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 the official 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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