Over the weekend, TechCrunch broke the story that Facebook had taken a user’s vanity URL and sold it to audio-entertainment solutions company Harman International. Facebook claimed the user, Harman Bajwa, was “violating Facebook’s policies” and his username didn’t have a clear connection to his identity. However, “Harman” as Harman Bajwa’s vanity URL seems perfectly fitting, and TechCrunch saw the revocation of facebook.com/Harman as all about making a sales deal. Harman International wanted the URL because of a campaign they’re working on for the Grammys, and initially tried to bribe Harman Bajwa citing a past gift of Coke Zero for Twitter handle twitter.com/avtr during promotion of the movie Avatar.

After the story broke I was talking with a friend about it and he was hardly surprised (unlike myself). He felt that users are willfully choosing to participate in Facebook’s network by opening an account, so terms of use are ultimately according to Facebook. Since Facebook created the option of a vanity URL in the first place, they can decide to take it away at any time.

However, I disagreed with his stance, noting that lack of respect for the individuals the site and company are founded on is a huge PR misstep and flawed business practice. Facebook’s success is because of its users. The popularity of the social networking site over time is a direct result of viral growth through users and the main catalyst for ad growth and thus ad revenues.

The URL has since been given back to Harman Bajwa with an apology from Facebook, but the incident made me want to research Facebook’s official policy regarding vanity URL’s. If you go to facebook.com/username, their stance covers their backs in all respects:

I’m not sure if their policy has always been this overarching, I’d be curious to know if it was the same prior to the Harman incident (I’m guessing it wasn’t).

What’s even more interesting is when I went to create a vanity URL for one of my clients this morning, Facebook lists “several things for you to remember” upon confirmation, stating “You can’t transfer ownership of a username to another party”. Isn’t that exactly what Facebook was trying to do? Transfer ownership from Harman Bajwa to Harman International? Maybe if Facebook started abiding by the rules they set for their own users, the company wouldn’t receive as much backlash as compared to recent months.

What do you think about this incident? Yes, Facebook technically has the right to revoke these usernames per their policy, but is it ethically sound when one’s business is fueled by its users? Would love to hear your comments below.

Tags: facebook

This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 4:53 pm and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.