The Social

One of the myriad URL-shortening services out there, found at Tr.im, suffered an outage for some time Wednesday, rendering many links unable to redirect.

The service--which is owned by a start-up called the Nambu Network--believes hackers are to blame. "From this end it appeared we suffered a denial of service attack, and we took appropriate action to get the website back to full service," a Trim representative said to CNET News in an e-mail.

There's another, less likely possible culprit: Airline JetBlue hit one million Twitter followers on Wednesday, and announced a one day-only commemorative deal that would shave 20 percent off the cost of any flights booked through a promotional link. It used Trim as the URL shortener for the link in question, and acknowledged in its "JetBlue Cheeps" Twitter-deals account that heavy volume from the sale may have unexpectedly caused the outage.

Whether or not it was the JetBlue promotion that crippled Trim, there's a bigger-picture problem here: URL shorteners like TinyURL, Bitly, Owly, Isgd, and related offerings from Digg and StumbleUpon, are a huge deal when we've all grown accustomed to fitting stuff into 140-character fields. Some, like Bitly (which Twitter uses as its automatic link shortener and which has been talked up as a possible acquisition for the microblogging company) and Trim, offer some tracking data and analytics surrounding the links plugged into their systems.

But when one crashes, so do all the links associated with it. Or what happens if a URL shortener goes out of business altogether? There would be a whole lot of lost, broken links out there. Some very small URLs could have a very big impact on the organization of the Web.

This post was updated at 1:13 p.m. PT.

Marketer and avid Twitterer Ian Schafer gives his perspective.

(Credit: Twitter)

The servers didn't crash, the system didn't go haywire, and no locusts started spewing out of anyone's monitors when Facebook let its 200-million-plus members reserve customized URLs on Saturday at 12:01 AM Eastern. 200,000 user names were reserved in a matter of three minutes, according to Twitter posts from Facebook employees.

"Well, that was anti-climactic. Worked, no bugs, and I got my name," someone told me in an instant message. "Was exciting for a hot second though!"

I did notice some Facebook pages loading more slowly than usual. After all, the whole thing was hyped beyond belief, at least in certain circles. My Twitter feed was bogged down with "countdown"-related tweets and people proudly announcing their new URLs, but it's unclear how many people who aren't affiliated with the tech or media industries actually cared. Regardless, Facebook appears to have carried this out very smoothly, undoubtedly with beefed-up server power in place to streamline the process.

But it's not over for Facebook. Now, the social network will have to deal with an invariably bloated degree of customer service complaints, as well as a likely stream of legal inquiries pertaining to copyrights and trademarks.

For the moment, however, it appears to have been even less eventful than the so-called "Twitpocalypse" that freaked out the blogosphere earlier on Friday.

UPDATE (9:33 p.m. PT): We've heard from a few people who were trying to grab their first names and couldn't--even though the names didn't appear to be reserved already. One of them speculates that Facebook may have simply "cancelled out" some popular names.

It really shouldn't be this much of a media sensation, but let's face it: Everybody's talking about how Facebook is finally letting members reserve vanity URLs, letting them customize the Web addresses that lead to their profiles. The feature goes live at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday (9:01 p.m. PDT on Friday) and already, the pundits are going mad.

"This is more than 200 million users, already engaged, simultaneously scrambling in the greatest territory dash since the Oklahoma Territory's land run of 1889, albeit with fewer shotgun injuries," author Douglas Rushkoff wrote in an editorial piece on The Daily Beast about the occasion.

Well, it's not quite that momentous. The thing about vanity URLs is that they're nothing new: MySpace has made it possible for members to replace the string of numbers in their profiles with www.myspace.com/username for years now. Aside from the fact that your profile may have more "Google juice" and it'll be easier to tell people how to find you on the social network, this isn't going to be a huge deal for Facebook members--yet. Except that we all get possessive, and the territory battle for your full name, your old college nickname, or your AOL screen name circa 1996 could get ugly.

The potential difficulty for some users is that Facebook is leaving a lot of questions unanswered. So here's CNET News' quick cheat sheet to what will and what might happen--in case you were wondering.

What happens when the vanity URL feature goes live?

Until this point, Facebook members' profiles have been accessible by unique URLs, but they're hard to remember because they use identification numbers rather than custom names. But starting Saturday at midnight Eastern, Facebook will start bringing up an alert message to members who visit the site--unless they're members who registered after 3:00 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, or brands that created "fan pages" after May 31. If your Facebook account falls under these criteria, there may be a delay because of Facebook's concern that people will snap up names just to "squat" on them and sell them. That's been a problem in the domain name business for about as long as the Web has been around.

So, assuming you fit Facebook's timeline, the alert message will pop up and give you a number of options for selecting your new custom name: your full name, your first name and last initial, your first initial and last name, or other options that happen to be available. You can also type in your own, provided it's at least five characters long and doesn't include any characters besides letters, numbers, and the dot symbol (though presumably you can only use the dot in between alphanumeric characters). It doesn't appear to be a mandatory switch, though Facebook will probably keep bugging you about it if you don't switch immediately.

Are any names taken already?

Yeah, if your name is "Mark Zuckerberg" but you aren't that Mark Zuckerberg, you might not get what you want even if you're the first guy logging in at 12:01 a.m. Some Facebook employees have already started using their vanity URLs, and some very popular brands' "fan pages" have them set already as well. Facebook has a request form for businesses that want to make sure their trademarks stay out of other members' user names.

More recently, Facebook also reserved names for some public figures who were at the risk of impersonation or URL squatting, and additionally offered names early to some journalists and analysts covering or working with Facebook--which means that, yes, www.facebook.com/carolinemccarthy is reserved already. (For what it's worth, Facebook told me I could accept that user name that they'd reserve, but if I wanted any other one I'd have to wait until the public name selection became available.

So it doesn't have to include my real name?

Facebook has always been adamant about making sure that members use their real names in their profiles. That's not the case with the new vanity URLs; you are officially allowed to use a nickname, your Twitter username, or the results from what happens when you run your name through a pirate name generator, as long as nobody's claimed it already. If it contains obscenities, though, Facebook will probably flag it for removal.

Is it really true that I can't change it?

That's what it sounds like. Facebook has well over 200 million members. Customer service has never been its greatest strength, either. Good luck getting them to accept your extremely urgent need to add your middle name.

Will Facebook's servers hold up?

We don't know. But considering the PR disaster that would ensue if Facebook crashed during the "land grab," it's safe to assume that the social network has been working very hard to make sure it can withstand the onslaught of members eagerly logging on as early as they can.

"We underwent testing before announcing the feature and we are taking steps to handle additional traffic," Facebook spokesman Larry Yu said in an e-mail. "It's hard to get into specifics since it's difficult to predict what traffic will actually be like."

For a second opinion, we sent an e-mail over to a representative at uptime monitoring firm Pingdom to see if it thinks there's a serious possibility that Facebook could crash entirely. Its answer: probably not.

"What I suspect is that we won't see any slowdown, and if we do it won't be much," the company's e-mail response read. "But who knows? The only ones with a clue right now are Facebook's engineers. However, if they have enough of a performance margin for several months of organic growth in their user base, they should be able to handle the increased number of visitors tomorrow."

Where will this go from here?

Facebook user names could go in a heck of a lot of directions; the post announcing the vanity URLs coyly hinted that "we expect to offer even more ways to use your Facebook user name in the future." It's a good guess that at some point you'll be able to log into the site with your user name, rather than your e-mail address. This, obviously, could then be extended to sites using the Facebook Connect or even the site's forthcoming virtual currency.

So what do I do now?

If you care enough about Facebook vanity URLs to have read this all the way through, I guess it's time to set an alarm clock.

(Credit: Facebook)

Facebook's 200-plus million members will be able to customize the URLs to their profiles starting at midnight Eastern on Saturday, according to a post on the Facebook blog. Currently, users' profile URLs have been structured as a string of numbers. At least for now, it doesn't look like the switch is mandatory.

This is a move that will help Facebook profiles get better traction in search engines, potentially upping traffic--and give people-search sites a run for their money in the process. For brands whose "fan pages" are a crucial part of Facebook's marketing and advertising strategy, it'll make their pages easier for people to access without needing to click around much.

But there's fine print! "Think carefully about the user name you choose. Once it's been selected, you won't be able to change or transfer it," the post by Facebook's Blaise DiPersia read. "If you signed up for a Facebook Page after May 31 or a user profile after today at 3 p.m. EDT, you may not be able to sign up for a user name immediately because of steps we've taken to prevent abuse or 'squatting' on names."

There's something significant here: not being able to change or transfer your Facebook name means that it's less likely there will be a big market for them on eBay, Craigslist, or elsewhere, something that could easily get out of hand otherwise.

Also: "We expect to offer even more ways to use your Facebook user name in the future," DiPersia wrote. Presumably, this means that you'll be able to use it for Facebook Connect log-ins on external sites, rather than your e-mail address.