Another Facebook discovery:

Let's say you create an account but provide the bare minimum of profile information. No address, no phone number, no employer info, no politics. Sometime later you wish to change your Username, let's say because you want to add a word to distinguish you from others (e.g. change from "Jack Smith" to "Jack Surferguy Smith"). You log in, you go to Account Settings, your connection is now https, and click to change user name. This pops up:

Before you can set your username, you need to verify your account.
If you have a mobile phone that can receive SMS messages, you can verify via mobile phone. If not, please try to register your username at a later time.

If you click Continue, you are given the option of a SMS text message being sent or call-me-now.

That's right, you cannot change it without giving Facebook your phone number. I wonder why?

SORTA-RELATED: Kudos to the folks at Microsoft and/or Firefox for putting together a package that causes the browser to lose focus periodically. This doesn't happen if you only have, say 5 browser sessions up (each with half a dozen tabs), but if you have more sessions, the probability increases to a near certainty. This is on a new machine (6 months old) with plenty of horsepower, Windows 7, FF 3.6.13. This never happened on older machines. (Nor does it happen on an XP with FF 3.6.13) So the lesson is, as products evolve, they become less capable. Good to know.


posted by Quiddity at 6/28/2011 05:55:00 AM