Here’s what was on my Facebook home page this morning:

Soon you will be able to have a username

Starting on Saturday, June 13th, at 12:01am in your time zone, you’ll be able to choose a username for your Facebook account to easily direct friends, family, and coworkers to your profile.

What this means that instead of your Facebook profile being designated by a number, you can have an individually designated user name so your friends can type “/username” and find you.

Good, simple idea, right? Well, nothing that Facebook ever does is without controversy. Everyone is pretty confident that there will be a mad dash to secure names, but it could go bad, even to the point of squatting on names to extort cash from people who really have that name, as some are saying. I should be OK in getting a user name close to my desire, but probably my friend Bob Smith will have to come up with something really creative.

Meanwhile, I wonder if making my Facebook profile a true personal home page accessible by anyone searching on Google or Bing isn’t the exact opposite of my desire to use Facebook as a way to communicate to only people I know and trust. I don’t need another home page to the World Wide Web. The greatest selling point to me in even participating in Facebook is its security features.

To some folks, this change to user names will get a big Hallelujah! But others may think that it’s the beginning of a slow death to a great application.