If you've been keeping up with Facebook's blog (or if you've logged in over the last day or two), you may have heard that Facebook is about to implement Usernames. That might sound like a small thing to you, and Facebook's blog suggests that it is. On the contrary, I think it is more likely the beginning of what will become a massive wave of squatting, IP snatching, and trademark squatting. In short: the Facebook Trademarkalypse.

See, here's how it's gonna work. In about sixty-eight hours, Facebook is going to pull the trigger on their starter pistol, and we're all going to make a mad dash toward their new "Choose Your New Username" feature in an attempt to snag the best name. Sound like a crap-shoot? It is.

Facebook has 300 million users. The last time I checked, no possible permutation of first and last names will produce 300 million unique combinations. That means that there's gonna be a whole lot of pissed-off users. That's why Facebook isn't just assigning usernames arbitrarily - to do so would result in somewhere around (3 million - # of discrete names on Facebook) angry users who've had some random alphanumeric hash tacked onto the end of their username to distinguish them from the 30 other people with the exact same name.

But that's not really even the issue. The issue is that they let you choose your own username arbitrarily - meaning that you can just go right ahead and call yourself "20th Century Fox" or "Barack Obama Sucks" or whatever you decide you want to. The potential for trademark squatting and hijacking is immense - and Facebook's attempts to mitigate the risk of Trademark violation might actually wind up making it worse.

Since the blog post about the new Facebook Usernames, Facebook has put into place a page where trademark holders can make sure that their registered trademarks aren't infringed. That page is shown here:

So essentially, Facebook is asking for two pieces of publicly available information, and then they will prevent other people from registering that username. People like the actual holders of the trademark, if squatters get to this form before the trademark holders do. Any con-artist with half a brain is going to know that getting tied up in a messy trademark issue with a social network renowned for never answering its emails is a system ripe with potential abuse - and this page could give cyber-squatters another layer of red tape to hide behind.

Is Facebook's username feature going to be the end of the world? Probably not. Is it going to turn into a major hassle for the social network? Absolutely. Is there any functional purpose to it? No. It's purely driven by vanity, and Facebook's increasingly desperate attempts to offer a feature set similar to up-and-coming rival Twitter, something which is just not going to happen. This whole username thing is going to go down as one of Facebook's first really major stumbles (their TOS snafu earlier this year being the last big crisis, despite Michael Arrington's bizarre, oft-repeated assertion that there is some kind of huge problem on Facebook involving breasts and nazis).

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go start waiting to snipe "http://www.facebook.com/rupert.murdoch" and see if I can make some bank out of this whole mess.