Facebook is finally making the move to usernames. Until now, your Facebook profile page URL has been something like this:

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=712594733

Not exactly easy to remember, but then again, it’s pretty easy to go Facebook and search for a friend by name. Still, having a simple profile URL makes any social media site more usable. Starting on Saturday, June 13th, at 12:01am, you’ll be able to choose a username for your Facebook account to more easily direct people to your profile. Then you’ll have a URL that goes like this: http://facebook.com/yourusername.

For profile pages, this should be a fairly easy conversion (although the typical glitches are expected). You just need to visit facebook.com/username to set up your username. Only numbers, letters, and periods are allowed.

If you have a fan page, there are a few caveats. Your fan page must have at least 1,000 fans and have been created before 5/31/09. While I understand the reasoning behind this requirement (squatters), Facebook does face a challenge in dealing with legitimate brands and companies that have less than 1,000 fans.  For a more in-depth discussion of the issue, check out this article (and the comments) at Mashable. It’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out.