Much has been made of the vanity URLs auction that will take place on Facebook at 12:01 AM tonight. At that time, users will start scrambling to claim unique user names and their corresponding URL
(facebook.com/username). URLs will be given away for free on a first-come, first-serve basis.
However, SAI's Nicholas Carlson thinks the social networking giant is passing up a golden
revenue-generating opportunity. Earlier this week, he chided Facebook for giving away for free something it could have charged users and companies at least $5 per year for. It turns out that Facebook
originally planned to auction off the domain names, but later dropped the idea, according to an unnamed source.
"We think this would have worked great," Carlson says. "Normal users
probably wouldn't have to pay much if anything, and Facebook could have probably turned a nice buck from the competition over names like Facebook.com/BayAreaCars, not to mention just plain /Cars or
/TV." The report fails to mention why Facebook decided to drop the idea.
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