Vine offering vanity URLS

Starting on December 20, users of the mini-video creation and sharing site that hold verified accounts will be able to personalize their usernames and create profile pages.

Starting on December 20, users of the mini-video creation and sharing site that hold verified accounts will be able to personalize their usernames and create profile pages.

So, if your name's Imran and you're the first so named to sign up on Friday at 9am PST, you will be able to register vine.co/imran as your username and handle. Vine users without verified accounts will also be able to register vanity URLS, but not until December 23, three days later.

Vine's owner, Twitter, says that it will be automatically reserving profile URLs that 'mirror verified Twitter @usernames' so Jay-Z and Lady Gaga won't have to worry about being beaten by cybersquatters.

However, while Twitter says it will hold back those URLs, the account owners will still have to ask for them.

The move to 'vanity' URLs will enable Vine to create user-specific profile pages (something it currently lacks) which will also make searching for users' previous posts much simpler.

From December 20, users logging into Vine will see a page with instructions about how to register for a vanity URL.