On Friday, at a time when most people are usually out partying and looking forward to a doner kebab whilst stumbling home, Facebook decided to release it’s new vanity URLs for people to snap up and boy were they snapped up. According to Mashable, 5555 usernames were being registered every second at it’s highest point.

I would have been awake at 5am to nab my own username but due to heavy hayfever and a plethora of tablets that do nothing except make me drowsy, I slept right through until Saturday afternoon. Thankfully though, it seems my last name is relatively unique and I’m now the proud owner of facebook.com/philhancox. Along with twitter.com/philhancox and, of course, my own domain philhancox.co.uk, are there any more vanity URLs I should be snapping up?

Naturally a few funny and interesting Facebook usernames have also been registered. One of my favourites is facebook.com/defaults.aspx (of course, Facebook is primarily written in PHP but meh, it’s still genius) or facebook.com/index. I also quite like the mirror username facebook.com/moc.koobecaf and I’m sure with another 3 million or so vanity URLs registered, there will be another good few funny ones out there.

At the moment though I chose my vanity URL for the one reason they’re important: branding. With a Facebook URL, people and businesses (and those where the two are one and the same) can have their own shorter, attractive and more trustworthy Facebook brands instead of facebook.com/pages/blah/blah-blah-blah/01234567890 it can be facebook.com/business. Nice.

Facebook is realising Twitter is becoming a powerful tool that businesses are using to converse with their customers, and Facebook wants in on the action. Instead of businesses putting up signs saying follow us on twitter.com/business, they want them putting up signs saying check us out on facebook.com/business and vanity URLs are one step further at achieving this mission. We’ll see if vanity URLs help Facebook become a larger slice of the branding and social media strategy for businesses wanting to get closer to their customer.

Did you get your vanity URL? Friend me on facebook.com/philhancox and don’t forget to follow me at twitter.com/philhancox.

As if you hadn’t heard already, Twitter has made a spectacular feature change that has angered many, caused indifference in others but not really pleased anyone. You can no longer see replies to people you don’t follow. Which, of course, is difficult because you don’t even know they exist in the first place. So if you follow me and I tweet @stephenfry saying he’s brilliant but you don’t follow Stephen Fry, you won’t see my Tweet and won’t know Stephen Fry is brilliant. Whatever, you get the idea.

I’m quite upset about this feature change. I love going through my timeline and picking up on conversations, reading the whole conversation and even following the other person if I find them interesting. With this reply curtain I can no longer follow debates, conversations, see interesting links, tips, answers to questions, polls and so on. This is a massive part of the reason I use Twitter – to meet new people and learn new things, and it seems a lot of people agree.

I can appreciate that if you follow a lot of people, or follow noisy people, this feature might be relieving but (apparently) there used to be a setting that allowed you to switch the feature on or off. It is now defaulted to off, which is taking away our choice to decide whether or not to view @’s to people we don’t follow. I have, on very rare occasions, unfollowed people who were filling my timeline with noisy crap (if you post a rubbish quote by some random historian or political figure every 10 seconds, I will unfollow you). That was my choice. The cost of losing this one timeline greatly outweighed the cost of losing the many interesting @’s to people I don’t know.

It might be nice to have an additional feature which rates the importance of each person you follow, kind of like Facebook’s “hide this person” in the timeline. If someone is too noisy, I could tell Twitter to tone down the number of Tweets I get from that person.

If you want to send @’s but don’t want everyone else reading them, that’s the point of the DM’s. Or e-mail. Or a phonecall. Maybe a text message or a private message in a forum or even a carrier pigeon. If you don’t want your conversation to be public, don’t put it in public.

The reply will only be hidden if you start your Tweet with their name, so please don’t or people like me may not be able to follow the conversation. I’m starting my replies with #fixreplies, one of the trending topics at the moment. #twitterfail seems to be doing nicely, too.

So Twitter: This party is a bit quiet, can you bring all the guests back please? I want to eavesdrop those who are happy to bring their conversations to the party, learn something new and even make new friends. Like I used to be able to. Thanks.

Last night, around 1:48am, a disaster occurred, one that would shock me to my very core and affect my short term future. My kettle broke. Naturally, I had to report to my followers on Twitter that I was devastated by my loss.

My kettle is broken… no more tea….. what will I do without tea?!

I woke up this morning and through perserverance, managed to make a half-decent brew by boiling water in a pan and, as usual, logged onto the net and came across the following two replies on Twitter by a company called Stylish Goods:

@philhancox If you like any of our kettles, we can get them sent to you in super-fast time.

@philhancox See if you like any of the kettles here:- http://is.gd/tOYw and you can have a 5% discount as a twitter user.

What an example of wonderful Twittermarketing! First of all, they seem personal and not just automated replies to the keyword “kettle”. They recognised my urgency my stating kettles have a fast delivery time. Score 3 points here; 1 for recognising my Tweet in their marketing message, 2 for triggering the thought process in my mind to view their website for kettles and finally for telling me about their delivery times, all in less than 140 characters.

The second Tweet just seals the deal for me, a nice link and a 5% discount if I decide to buy. Suddenly, this company isn’t just auto-replying any more, they’re helping me out and making me valued at the same time. Unfortunately for Stylish Goods, I’m in a student crib and the maintenance form has been sent off, meaning I should get a new kettle soon. However, I will be moving out soon and I’m so impressed that I will use them to buy a kettle for my new flat.

But whilst the Twitter messages got me involved and triggered my internal purchasing decisions, the website, sadly, turned me off a bit. Clicking upon the link given took me to a page where, above the fold, all I could see was a digital scale and half a hand blender. Where are the stylish kettles? I had to scroll down to see them which in usability (and conversion) fields is a big no-no. It would have been better to send me to the search results for kettle which does just show the kettles but unfortunately neither they nor I can link to because it doesn’t generate a unique URL.

I could mention a lot more about the site that could be improved, but I may save that for another time as I will be doing in-depth website reviews on this blog in the future. I just wanted to highlight Stylish Goods as they brightened up my morning with laser-targeted but effective and friendly marketing to a guy who is skeptical to such tactics. Congratulations guys, now improve your site to really capture those conversions.

This isn’t an advert, but it is a happy coincidence that this incident occured as only last night I was chatting to @hairycornflakes about his new tool, which is in beta release at tweetdock.com. It allows you to target Twitter users based on keywords and even geographical location and send them replies automatically (although you can check the messages first to ensure they will appreciate the message and personalise it for maximum effect). You can use it for more than one Twitter account which means if you have multiple websites, this could turn into one hell of an effective marketing tool and I look forward to using it myself. I’ll blog about the results in the future, but for now, take a peek and see if it could do anything for you.

I have been part of the Twitter crowd (follow me @philhancox!) for about three or four months now and am thoroughly enjoying using it and watching its meteoric rise into the consciousness of marketers, geeks, businesses, celebrities and normal folk. Each week there is a new Twitter story, whether its Tweeters disgruntled with Ryanairs Twitter feeds, Skittles switching its homepage to Twitter mentions of its brand or Stephen Fry Tweeting on TV, there is no denying how popular the microblogging site has become.

And the Twitter story of last week – the race to 1,000,000 followers. Was it to be Ashton ‘Dude Where’s My Car’ Kutcher or the CNN news feed? It was, of course, Mr. Demi Moore who was crowned the ‘King of Twitter’ as he reached the one million milestone first. The Punk’d star even recorded the momentous occasion live and declared

one man can have a voice that’s as loud as an entire media company. And you can have that voice as well. And we can all have that voice together. And, and, and we can change media forever

Ha! First of all, the normal man isn’t a Hollywood celebrity, one who posts half-naked pictures of his gorgeous wife on the internet. And secondly, whilst Twitter is brilliant for real-time news (take the Hudson River crash as an example), I’m certainly not going to be going to Ashton Kutcher for the latest headlines.

The man becomes more unpopular, however, when we find out Oprah is launching her own Twitter profile just as the “King of Twitter” is scheduled to speak on her show, along with the Twitter founders. So, whilst we were originally not giving a flying monkeys about how cool Kutcher thinks he is, we’re now thinking it’s all a bit convenient. Take, for example, this post which reports 1,113 billboards donated by the third biggest billboard company in America urging passers by to follow @aplusk. It also claims that users were blocked from unfollowing either Ashton or CNN in an attempt to ensure that at least one would reach the milestone.

Oprah is now being belittled by the #herebeforeoprah campaign and Ashton is getting a #backlashton. In my eyes, celebrities like Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross or Philip Schofield are the kings of Twitter. They engage in conversations with fans, give interesting insights into their lives, share links and pictures and, most importantly, gained followers naturally due to the previous three reasons. That’s how Twitter should work and why I’m enjoying it so much.

It’s great that Twitter is gathering such a huge following to people of all backgrounds and lifestyles, and celebrities are helping achieve that. I don’t necessarily agree that social media such as Twitter spells the end for corporate news sources because that’s not the point of it – Twitter gives us real-time teasers of news stories that are explained thoroughly (biased or not) by the investigative journalism of more corporate news sources – but it’s certainly an interesting addition to the way we absorb and share information.

But the Ashton million thing is a complete joke. That’s not the point of Twitter (yes, I’m also talking to you idiots who follow me and try and sell me viral follower adding services), and those of you who also thought it was a joke will understand why.