So the landgrab came and went, you got your facebook username – didn’t you?

Most did, others didn’t.

I got mine - which is just my name. For some disgusting reason that I’ll never understand, others didn’t choose their names. Instead they grabbed buzzwords, keywords, trademarks and even other peoples names.

One instance of the stupidity that some people went to was for one user to set their username to “default.aspx”.

Yeah, yeah, I get the joke. Ha ha. Its the default page of a .NET web application. Of course only programmers and technology folks are going to get this – so if you hang around with anyone outside of this industry they are going to look at you funny.

It has been said that some people have grabbed the valuable keywords in order to sell the account later – but most people have actually built up a personal account already and then done set their username. What this means is that whomever purchases the account will then have 210 random friends, a tonne of useless and unrelated notes and updates along with numerous pictures of the previous owner on nights out on the tiles.

Effectively you have a mess. Which devalues the keywords dramatically and hence makes buying the account a non-starter.

For those that are not going to sell their accounts – they just thought it would be cool to set their username to something random like “musicnews” when they seem to exhibit no musical interest at all. On top of that, their privacy settings are set to only show the account to friends.

This makes me frown a lot.

The only reason to set your username to musicnews should be for SEO reasons. The keywords are valuable if your contents are musically inclined.

I’m sure, down the line, a lot of people will abandon their accounts and create new ones with their actual name as their username, so that they’d get:

http://www.facebook.com/theiractualname

The fad will fade, they’ll realise that their username is stupid and jump ship. Since Facebook doesn’t allow you to change your username after you set it, they are effectively forcing these people into creating another account. Maybe this makes their stats look good, but it costs them money to store the extra data – so they are getting bitten for no gain.

This in turn leaves valuable usernames dormant. They could have been put to better use on user pages – which are usually places that would actually warrant the keyword attention.

Take MusicReviewZone.com‘s Facebook page, here, as an example:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Music-Review-Zone/93777063419

I wanted to make this pages username :

http://www.facebook.com/musicnews

… as the keyword value passed through to the domain would re-enforce that my site provides music news. Hence – great SEO. Instead, someone called Roberta Ferguson from Cleveland, with her locked down account has the username. Brilliant value.

When the username landgrab became available in April, pages with less than 1000 fans were excluded. Facebook stated at the time that these pages would be able to set their usernames after June 28th. That date has come and gone yet Facebook is still exluding them from setting their usernames.

So what gives?

Tags: facebook, music review zone, SEO

Categories: My Sites, SEO

I recently got an email from Twitter to indicate that someone was now following my updates. There is nothing out of the ordinary about this, but I logged in anyway to find out more about the user – cause this is what I do.

When I clicked on the user to follow them I got hit with the error message at the bottom of this post.

I wonder what this user was doing. They didn’t send me any unsolicited emails or try to sell me anything.

Any ideas?

You should follow me on twitter to get all the latest updates from Music Review Zone.

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Tags: music review zone, strange activity, twitter

Categories: MusicReviewZone.com

Well, another month down and the continuation of Musc Review Zone continues.

The Music site has moved up to a PageRank of 3 in as many months. A fantastic rise considering that it is only into its fifth month. This is all due to marketing the site in all the right places – Technorati, Entrecard, Other Blogs, forums, digg, reddit etc.

Without further ado … Here are the top 5 articles from my Music News and Album Reviews website :

1. Pete Doherty Is Homeless
2. Guns N’ Roses: Chinese Democracy is ready
3. Simon Cowell: American Idol is Boring
4. Velvet Revolver Kick Weiland
5. John Lennon Widow Feels Sorry For Heather Mills

As always, you should drop by and contribute. Comments help to create a community. At this stage I am looking for guest posters – so if you have a keen interest in Music (any and all tastes) – let me know via this form. Or this form.

Tags: music review zone

Categories: MusicReviewZone.com, My Sites