As my typical morning ritual, I turned on my computer and went directly to Google.  They has one of their cool designs for Google but the letters were all wrong.  It said Topeka in the google font and colors.  There was a link to a post explaining it.  It took me a few moments to realize it was an April fools joke, and very funny!

Go to google.co or read the post right here.  Topeka formerly know as google.

I imagine a million people will link to this page.  So now when people searck for Topeka, will google show up in the search results?

Official Google Blog: A different kind of company name

Maybe you are like me on claiming your facebook name — a bit too late. Someone else who doesn’t even have my exact name used it for theirs. Her name is DaLana Hawkins. Geez.

So this is how it works. You can use a period or a dot ” . ” in between any letters in your name but once someone chooses all the letter you want in a row, regardless of the dots between, your name has been taken. You can only use three dots in a name. So all these names are the same to facebook:

lanahawkins
lana.hawkins
l.a.n.ahawkins
lanahawkin.s

Get it?

When you go to select your name in facebook you can see if any particular combination is available. I believe it is under settings. Facebook will give you some choices if your name is taken like lanahawkins2, lanahawkins3 — totally lame in my humble opinion.

So I took Janak’s advice and thought of my name as a keyword and used it twice. I chose:

lanahawkins.lana.hawkins

So my facebook link is http://facebook.com/lanahawkins.lana.hawkins

I’ll have to see what happens in a search for this one and I’ll update this post if anything interesting happens.

P.S. this is very similar for google gmail too.