"UPDATE: My friend Bill Cammack talked about this over on his awesome blog. As is usually the case, we tend to clarify our points in comments better than we do if we just post on our own. Go over and read his post (it's short). Here's my comment over there. It goes into a bit more of my thought process on why I chose my real name instead of my username on Facebook: "Hey man, I posted on this too. I was wondering about this myself. Facebook.com/christine.cavalier is my vanity URL but I almost took /purplecar. My reasoning was this: every other web app I take the "username" purplecar and "real name" christine cavalier. Why should facebook be different? But then I thought about the search behaviors of people on Facebook. People search Facebook in a unique manner, compared to other sites. They search for people, mostly, by just name, forgoing drilling down into networks or groups until after their initial search has turned up fruitless (yet abundant) search results. (We all are acutely..." - Christine Cavalier