14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook created somewhat of a mass hysteria when it introduced vanity URLs earlier this year. Millions flocked to secure their usernames and Facebook got a lot of praise and attention for introducing the feature, despite the fact that MySpace and even Twitter had the same functionality from the get-go. Now that everyone has gotten used to the usernames, Facebook is finally doing something practical with them and is now letting users log in with their usernames rather than their email address.
“Beginning today, you also will be able to log in to your Facebook account with your username from any Web browser, mobile phone or Facebook Connect-enabled website,” Facebook engineer Bikash Agarwalla wrote. “You will still be able to log in with your email address. We just wanted to add a more convenient way to access your Facebook account. A username gives you an easy-to-remember web address for your Facebook profile so your friends can more easily find and connect with you.”
The benefits of this are pretty obvious, allowing users to log into Facebook employing only their usernames, which is easier, faster and more convenient. It could also make it harder for infrequent users to forget their credentials. Again, Facebook isn't actually doing anything revolutionary here, it just enabled a feature that most other sites online have had since the early days of the Internet and using an email address as login credentials only started being adopted by more sites in recent years.
Requiring users to supply an email address does have its own advantages and Facebook still requires one when signing up for the social network and only then users can request their own custom URL. The feature was introduced over the summer and proved to be a huge success, with over one million users signing up for the feature in the first hour after launch, despite being available only to those with over 1,000 friends. Since then, usernames have been enabled for everyone.