Facebook creates confusion with vanity URLs

If there’s a way to cause confusion for the masses, Facebook will discover it. 

That’s what’s happened within the last 24 hours. Facebook announced yesterday in its blog that users can start claiming their vanity URLs for both their Profile and Pages starting at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday, June 13.

An alert reader of my ezine emailed me and asked if I knew about the earlier deadline. She send me this link, which leads to a Facebook page, below, announcing that the users can claim the vanity URLs “Starting on Friday, June 12th, at 11:01pm.”  It suggests we “Check out the Facebook Blog for more informaton.” But that blog includes the notice in the box above and says we can start claiming URLs on Saturday. 

Which is it? Friday or Saturday?

As if that isn’t confusing enough, I’m sure many people, me included, missed reading the rules that say:

• “If you signed up for a Facebook Page after May 31 or a user profile after today (June 9) at 3 p.m. EDT, you may not be able to sign up for a username immediately because of steps we’ve taken to prevent abuse or ‘squatting’ on names.”
• “Your Facebook Page must meet two requirements: it must be live on Facebook prior to the May 31, 2009 cut-off date and have a minimum 1,000 fans as of May 31, 2009.” Many small business people who haven’t been able to accumulate that many fans won’t be able to claim the vanity URL. I’m 15 short of the 1,000 minimum.

Can somebody clarify whether we can start claiming URLs on Friday or Saturday?