As of today Facebook has added the functionality of users being able to select usernames. The immediate benefits of this are:

• Users will be able to direct their friends to their profile in:
  • a more direct and easy manner
  • Profile links can now be shared verbally
• Facebook was nagging behind in this are when compared with other social networking services like LinkedIn and MySpace, which already allow their users to share their profiles in the above manner.

So hurry up and get your username, before its taken up by someone else. To select a username for Facebook visit: http://www.facebook.com/username/

The good thing about Facebook usernames are that they allow you to have  periods (.) in the username and the suggested usernames are also very good.

Now since Orkut is trying to memic Facebook, we may see the username feature being implemented on Orkut as well in some time (just a guess, do not bet on it).