About Lana HawkinsHelping business owners build and maintain their small business websites.
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.