Claim your Facebook vanity URL, the race is on!

Race to grab your own URL's on the social networking group, Facebook, is on. Claim it early before it is all gone.

It all started on Saturday after midnight, when Facebook debuted usernames for companies, individuals and groups, in order to finally enable everyone to grab an easy-to-remember, easy-to-share URL for profile or page.

If you are late, you still can do it, all you got to do is to hit facebook.com/usernames in your browser. You'll be prompted to login and, upon doing so, if qualified; you'll be given some initial options for Facebook usernames.

If the initial selections aren't what you want, just click on "More" to reveal a field where you can enter your own username and check its availability. If it is available, that's it, just accept it to save your changes.

Within seven minutes of the service being available last night, 345,000 users grabbed one each. Within 15 minutes, over a half million had, Facebook usernames, spokesperson Larry Yu said.

With Facebook offering vanity URLs for the first time, social media expert Susan Jacobson of Temple University's journalism department advises organisations as well as celebrities and politicians to claim their URLs early to avoid having to battle later with a cybersquatter.

"Generally speaking the best defense against cybersquatting or potential malicious use of a famous name is to register accounts in your company's name on new social media sites as soon as they emerge," she explained.

Jacobson likens it to the early days of the internet when regular citizens would rush to buy domain names (i.e. www.madonna.com) and then sell them to celebrities for millions of dollars.

Famous name Facebook users are going to be interested in the vanity URLs because it will make it easier for non-Facebook users to find them, noted Jacobson.

Those Facebook users who restrict access to their information may find it more convenient for their friends to connect to them with the vanity URLs, but their friends will still have to log in to see their restricted information, she said.

Not everyone was happy with the results of the URL FACEBOOK landgrab, as most of the people didn't get the names they wanted within minutes of login. Congratulations, if you got your's.