Facebook, in a move that mimics rival MySpace’s ongoing feature, will now offer its users the choice of acquiring a unique username to attach to their profiles.

This will allow Facebook users to match their profile pages with a human-readable web URL, such as http://www.facebook.com/johndoe, effectively allowing better search and human recall for profile pages, and promotes better ratings for users in search engines. Currently, Facebook profile pages are linked via a web URL consisting of a jargon of letters and numbers.

This move by Facebook has led to significant “online land grabbing”, as users hurry to claim their own unique usernames before someone else does. Most users attempt to claim usernames that have high recall and prominence, which in turn, can adversely affect visibility, popularity and permanence of their own profile pages on the web.