[rejoinder]

Yeah, it's inevitable that the Jennifer Smiths are going to get miffed. I preferred the Facebook era without vanity URLs. It seemed sensible.

You could for a time (not sure if it still works) email users on facebook by using [e-mail] from any email address. Which is quite useful to get back in touch with people, now that people avoid listing their email addreses in email directories (people stopped doing that because they were fed up of spam). Having said that a non-vanity identifier could probably be used in the same way, so there isn't much point.

The author of this post, wants to make a land grab for his named handle all over the web. Well that's not much better.

I worked with a client yesterday that had bought 33 alternative domain names that were similarish to their company name. Why even bother! There were many obvious name / term combinations that they had missed anyway. What a waste of money and time!

I liked his resolution of just advertising his web address, and from there people could discover other handles for other services.

It's only made things more complex with the myriad of compnay handles on different services. Adverts on TV (in the UK) now don't even list their domain name, they just advertise Facebook and Twitter handles. I personally prefer loose identifiers: 'Lucy who does ITV's weather'. Even the presenters have their Twitter handles displayed on screen now!

It is not like you are likely to remember most of these handles anyway. Even if you tried to guess one, do you use camel case, underscores, spaces etc?

There is a little UI value in having recognisable identifiers, but at the end of the day vanity URLs are about as twatty as personalised number plates.