By now, even if you are remotely connected to the internet, you would know that Facebook is one of the most popular web sites in the world. Facebook has over 200 million users as of this writing, and its rising every day. In Kenya, Facebook is the fourth most popular web site on the web and the most popular on the mobile web. Facebook is also only second to internet juggernauts like Google and Yahoo! in global traffic which indicates that it has gone mainstream, globally.

Therefore, since Facebook usernames went “live” early this morning, close to 200,000 usernames we’re registered in less than 3 minutes. In a little over 15 minutes, over half a million usernames had been registered. By now, I can conservatively estimate that the number will be in the millions by the end of today. Clearly, Facebook usernames are a big deal for many of their 200 million users!

However trivial they may seem, Facebook usernames are actually important for a good number of reasons. Whatever these reasons may be, it has become plainly obvious that social networks like Facebook have firmly established themselves as the center stages of our online time. We are spending less and less time on email, search engines, news sites and portals by becoming more and more engaged with endless online conversations on social networks like Facebook. It is this new internet reality that makes Facebook usernames so compelling for many of its users.

Ultimately, no one wants a cryptic URL for their Facebook identity. They want above all a user-friendly and memorable username that defines them on the world’s most popular social network. Well-known brands also want to ensure that they have a unique and transparent identity on Facebook, where they are increasingly engaging more and more of their customers and growing their businesses. Facebook usernames also improve search engine indexing for pages and associated keywords, thereby raising search engine results. Lastly, Facebook users will end up pre-emptively navigating directly to a Facebook page using a username rather than doing an online search to find it.

So, in a nushell, as the dymanics of the web change and more users dedicate their time online to social networks like Facebook, away from search engines and other (currently) popular portals, having a Facebook username is a very big deal!