July 7, 2011

Get Your Own Google+ Vanity URL

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Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Google+ doesn’t offer vanity URLs for user profiles, making it more difficult to share your Google+ Profile with your friends. Instead, Google uses a long string of numbers to denote users (e.g. 116220513003681535015).

The reason Google+ doesn’t use vanity URLs is because those could lead to spammers figuring out the email addresses of millions of Google+ users (since many Google Accounts are linked to Gmail accounts).

Of course, this leads to a problem: you don’t want to be telling people to type in a long string of numbers to find your Google+ Profile. That’s where Gplus.to comes in. This simple little app lets you create a short URL for your Google+ page, making it easy to share with your friends. Mine, for example, is Gplus.to/TARUN, which is much easier to remember than a random strong of numbers.

Gplus.to fills a gap that Google+ doesn’t currently address. Should Google give users the ability to create vanity URLs, or is it too much of a privacy concern because of its connection to Gmail?

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