Google+ has arrived, is in full swing and people are loving it. But there are still things that people coming from Facebook desire in Google+. For one, Google+ does not offer vanity URLs like Facebook. A vanity URL is a short URL to your profile which is easy to remember and share – in contrast to a URL with twenty one character long profile ID. But if you want, you can still have a shorter vanity URL using third party website gplus.to. Here is how :
- Visit the Google+ website https://plus.google.com/ and logon to your Google+ account.
- Note down your Google+ profile ID from the address bar as shown. It is twenty one character long ID starting after google.com in the address bar of your browser.
- Now point your browser to http://gplus.to/. Copy-paste (or type) your Google+ profile ID (that you found in the step 2 above) in the Google+ ID field. Then type a nick for the short URL. This nick can be between three to twenty five characters long and can contain letters and numbers only. Finally click on the Add button.
- If everything goes okay, you will be shown your shorter vanity URL for your Google+ profile. This URL is simply gplus.to/ followed by your chosen nick.
Google+ is still in the budding stage and the vanity URL feature is not present. I expect that Google will add this feature in near future but till then you can make use of the free gplus.to service to have a shorter vanity URL for your Google+ profile.