Interesting URLs and especially social URLs with followers have value. And everything what has value can be sold. This case is very similar to domain names. Not a big difference really at all. Both commodities are limited and both generates some traffic.

I guess in the case of the Twitter account, it would be the equivalent of developing a website — they acquired a Twitter username that had no/little value and built it up into something of value.

I think the Facebook urls could have value to the right buyer. I guess a perfect example would be how one domainer acquired the /domaining facebook url — if Francois from Domaining.com was interested, he could maybe make some money. I think there will be some buyers – I certainly don’t believe it’ll be worthy of all the hype it received and like some people have said, 5 years from now Facebook will probably be long forgotten, so I would imagine any intelligent buyers of such names would keep that in mind when making offers.

They’re not “vanity urls” You’re not vain for having an url with words instead of a bunch of numbers!

“5 years from now Facebook will probably be long forgotten”

Its ignorant comments like this, and the whole facebook squatting fiasco that makes me wish that domainers would just stay away from social networking altogether.

@ Mike, just look at Myspace which is now a rotting cesspool of spam. That’s the way the Internet works. Back when I first got Internet access, it was Webcrawler and AltaVista that people were using, then there was AOL and Yahoo, and today most people use Google. Not very much on the Internet stays king for long — the barriers to entry are generally very low and the potential rewards are very high. As great as some people think Facebook is, it really is rather simple to duplicate — the only problem is convincing their users to come with you but Facebook managed to do that with Myspace, so I thing it’s ignorant to think it couldn’t happen again.

It still does not hurt to have another “Key Word” specific property that helps you to move you towards your goals. I picked the profile name: http://www.facebook.com/startabusiness because I am doing a JV with a developer and we are building a business startup community. So having a profile name that was an exact match will help us greatly in the future regardless of to domain or sub domain that we are able to utilize. I’m ok with their strategy and I believe that they are just utilizing the same concept that LinkedIn has with their system…

Comparing a social networking service to a search engine is a bit of a stretch..

You said that Facebook would be forgotten about in 5 years…that in itself is an ignorant statement. When I last checked, people were still on Myspace. Hell, even Friendster is still around. And if you think Facebook is easy to duplicate, go ahead and give it a try. I know there’s a few scripts out there (I know how you domainers like your “scripts”), but trying to mimick a social networking service like Facebook, and being successful with it, isn’t that easy.

It took a landrush for usernames in order to get domainers to pay attention to all of this, while people in Iran and other parts of the world are using these services for something meaningful. So please, do the rest of the world a favor, stick to your archaic parking pages and mini-sites, and leave the real innovation to everyone else..

http://www.facebook.com/hamburgers

BUY IT. lol. this has to be worth something to the fast food industry, right?

facebook.com/wordpress.org

lol