This is of course an important concept for people and companies building brands. If you can’t get a good Facebook name, the world will end. Ok. Not really.

Facebook reportedly registered 500,000 user names in the first 15 minutes! On Twitter, we’ve already seen people complaining about the way it was handled and the lack of control. This lead to someone else getting Darren Rowse’s http://www.facebook.com/problogger. This is important to his brand.

My name was also taken by the time I remembered to check an hour later. The other Jeff Rose looks like a hard working guy in a suit.

So I got to pick something else. Thankfully, I was reasonably clever and got TheJeffRose so I made out fairly well, I think. I won’t likely use it directly since I can set up this site to forward http://www.jeffrose.ca/facebook there and maintain my name. Same with http://www.jeffrose.ca/twitter.

Have you got your Facebook Username yet? When it comes time and your name is taken, remember to think creatively. I could have had jeff.rose1 – which was tempting as it’s my Skype ID, but Chris commented that it reminded him of AOL accounts circa 1995. I agreed. He got ChristopherJTurner which is pretty good.

Don’t settle for jeff.rose1 or something banal. Be creative, be memorable and most of all, be yourself.