Facebook Lets You Change Your Vanity URL, Upload Photos and Videos via Email
Popular social networking site Facebook has, in two waves, introduced the option to change your Facebook profile ID from a randomly assigned string of numbers like “id= 123456789” to a vanity URL. The first wave was opened to Facebook users on June 13th at precisely 12:01 EDT and it proved to be quite popular as an average of 500 vanity URLs were registered per second and a total of 345,000 users grabbed their personalized Facebook profile URL in the first 7 minutes.
There was one problem that bugged Facebook users though: you could not get a vanity URL unless you had at least 1,000 fans. Facebook explained that this was a means of preventing URL squatting, but since it limited prevented a total of 429,000 profiles from getting a vanity URL, it had to be dropped.
Facebook is continuing this “make things easier for the user” trend with one interesting new offer: you can change your vanity URL if you don’t like it. Until now Facebook warned users to be careful what username they pick as they will be stuck with it forever. This is no longer the case; Facebook now lets you change your username, but not as many times as you want. Facebook lets you change it ONCE, and that’s it! So if you picked a lame username before, try to pay attention this time.
Moving on, you should know that if you have some great photos or videos that you want to share with your Facebook friends, you can do so via email. Facebook’s Sameer Moidu explains: “We recently added the ability to upload photos and videos by e-mailing them to your Facebook account. Visit the Facebook Mobile page to get your personal upload email. This is a unique email address where you can send photos and videos from anywhere you have email access. After you attach your photos or videos to an email, you can include a subject line that will be used as the caption for the photos or videos you upload. If you're uploading more than one photo or video in the email, the captions will be the same for all of them.”
The catch is that the photos/videos will be uploaded to your account after the email reaches Facebook – and the time it takes for your email to be delivered may vary. The other catch is that you are restricted by the file size limits of your email provider. There are no limits to how many photos/videos you can share via email, but this email provider file size limitation means you may have to send multiple emails.
There was one problem that bugged Facebook users though: you could not get a vanity URL unless you had at least 1,000 fans. Facebook explained that this was a means of preventing URL squatting, but since it limited prevented a total of 429,000 profiles from getting a vanity URL, it had to be dropped.
Facebook is continuing this “make things easier for the user” trend with one interesting new offer: you can change your vanity URL if you don’t like it. Until now Facebook warned users to be careful what username they pick as they will be stuck with it forever. This is no longer the case; Facebook now lets you change your username, but not as many times as you want. Facebook lets you change it ONCE, and that’s it! So if you picked a lame username before, try to pay attention this time.
Moving on, you should know that if you have some great photos or videos that you want to share with your Facebook friends, you can do so via email. Facebook’s Sameer Moidu explains: “We recently added the ability to upload photos and videos by e-mailing them to your Facebook account. Visit the Facebook Mobile page to get your personal upload email. This is a unique email address where you can send photos and videos from anywhere you have email access. After you attach your photos or videos to an email, you can include a subject line that will be used as the caption for the photos or videos you upload. If you're uploading more than one photo or video in the email, the captions will be the same for all of them.”
The catch is that the photos/videos will be uploaded to your account after the email reaches Facebook – and the time it takes for your email to be delivered may vary. The other catch is that you are restricted by the file size limits of your email provider. There are no limits to how many photos/videos you can share via email, but this email provider file size limitation means you may have to send multiple emails.
