HOW TO: Get Your Own Google+ Vanity URL

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. 117691391504351341685).

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/BillCrosby, 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? Feel free to let us know in the comments.

 

 

Comments

  1. Problem: This is only a temporary solution.
    Question: How can we mask the long URL #’s with the temporary solution?
    ——————————————————————————-
    Once I have the shorten name, it directs me over to the Google+ page, but then it pops back to the original name.

    Thank you in advance for your thoughts on solving this.

    –CR

  2. Thanks Bill! I have been looking for how to get a Google+ vanity url for a while. Great article once again!

  3. Thank you for sharing this great piece of  info, Bill.

  4. Where were you the last months; there are hundreds of posts already. So quite in vain i must say.

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