Gawker’s website was recently busted into by crackers.  Username and passwords of the site were released to the public at large.

Needless to say, the lesson learned is pretty obvious.

Here are a few common rules as follows:

• Create passwords that are longer than six characters.
• Include a mix of uppercase, lowercase, special characters (!@#$%^&*), and numbers.
• Don’t use names, slang words, dictionary words, your e-mail address, birthdays, or trivial passwords.
• Use passphrases. A passphrase is a sentence that you condense into a password. For example, if your sentence is “Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are,” your password might be “Ttls#hIwwyr^”.
• Use a different password for every site you access.

Finally, PLEASE don’t place your passwords on a “post-it” note and then stick it to your monitor.

Facebook will offer vanity names starting at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday, June 13.  A vanity name formats the URL  (web address) in a more friendly way.  It uses a convention by name versus a randum pattern of characters often seen on commericial sites.

This is a great opportunity to brand your company name.  Vanity names and web addresses using the english format produce better organic results with search engines.  FaceBook is attempting to expand beyond the basic social website.  MySpace is a good example of the train that could have, but failed as competition passed it by.  Commercial opportunities create more revenue and this is a must for FaceBook.  Otherwise, FaceBook will fade into the distant past as Twitter takes it over.

The opportunity to produce revenue is a small window of time.  A few weeks back Twitter was asked when they anticipated on producing revenue.  The founders response was more or less “they are working on it” and will be layed out in their business plan.  That is a bit late considering Twitter is now on the third year of operations.  Hopefully FaceBook has a business plan with vision.  It is going to take more than vanity names to produce a profit.