Jul 5, 2011 10:03 GMT  ·  By

Google+ is in the early stages, so bugs, missing features and quirks are understandable. Early adopters can live without a lot of things, just so they can get the thrill of a new thing. But one thing they can't and shouldn't live without is vanity URLs for their accounts.

What good is a Google+ account if all you get is a long and ugly string to identify you by, something in the lines of plus.google.com/u/0/112868275446861480890.

Who's going to remember that, who is going to envy you for your slick new Google+ account that they can't have yet, since it's in private beta mode? Don't fret, it wasn't all for nothing, there is now a solution for your troubles.

Introducing Gplus.to, a URL shortener with a very specific purpose, to create a short, vanity URL for your profile, making it so much easier to show off to your friends, share with your Twitter followers or even with the totally unfashionable people still using Facebook.

Gplus.to is a URL shortener in essence, with a bit of a twist. Instead of providing it with generic links, you provide your Google+ account identifier, the long number in the profile link.

You get to pick your preferred user name, as long as it's not already taken and as long as it's longer that three characters. Suddenly, your long and cumbersome URL becomes something slick like gplus.to/toocoolforschool. Or perhaps you can think of something better.

If you're not too comfortable trusting an obscure website, you could wait around until Google+ gets its own, official vanity URLs. Google has said that the feature is coming, so all you need is a little patience.

As a side note, and we certainly don't encourage this, but this is a golden opportunity for you to troll your friends. While the obvious profiles, like Mark Zuckerberg's, have already been registered, if you want to prank your friends, just get their profile IDs and then register a short link in their name. They'll surely appreciate you for it.