I was able to successfully acquire my desired name in the great Facebook vanity URL landgrab of 2009. No longer am I Facebook Random User ID# 501415487. I can now be found at facebook.com/nathanielpayne. It’s a minor thing, truly, but one that I’m happy to have secured. And yes, I was up late at night acquiring the username. It was fun to watch the posts from my Facebook and Twitter friends, seeing who was able to get the usernames they wanted, and who ended up having to settle for their third or fourth or even fifth choices. I was also pleasantly surprised at how well the Facebook servers held up. There had to have been about a million users simultaneously hitting the same /username page trying to select the name they wanted. It didn’t even slow down or falter for me when I was making my attempt.

So, kudos to Facebook for enabling a great feature and making it run so smoothly. Hopefully enough people got the name they were looking for. If not, tought toodles. There’s always Orkut.