It seems like social networks are suddenly starting to realise that if people are going to put their lives on the internet, then they might want to have a proper identity.

Facebook have introduced what appear to be called “vanity URLs” to your profile. It seems a bit mean to say that having your profile accessible by something with your own name rather than a bunch of random numbers is vanity, but that seems to be the name that sticks. My profile is now accessible via: http://www.facebook.com/christine.blachford.

Odd thing to note, it offers you up some choices, or you can put in your own nickname. When choosing mine it said christine.blachford or christine.blachford1? Who would choose a 1 if they didn’t have to?

Anyway, according to the stats, over 550 people a second were picking their URLs as soon as the option was available, which just goes to show this feature has long been desired.

Elsewhere, Twitter introduced Verified Accounts which is a great idea. Instead of worrying whether someone is fake or not, the Twitter accounts of the real deal show a little banner. It’s being rolled out to a selected few at the moment, and I’ve only spotted it on Dooce so far.

(Congrats on the new baby!)

I don’t know how this is going to expand, or how Twitter is checking the validity of each account, but I am very much behind this new functionality. The F1 community has a lot of “fake” accounts that are thankfully titled fakedrivername, but there are plenty of celeb accounts that are faked with no real way of knowing unless you know. A good move from Twitter.