Facebook Page of 47,000 Gets Reinstated After Facebook Shut It Down for Trademark Violation

by Jeremy Blanton on July 15, 2010

It appears that the Facebook page that used the trademarked term REALTORS® in it’s vanity URL and was shut down yesterday has been reinstated.  As of tonight, the page called The Official Real Estate Referral Group has had their vanity URL changed from http://facebook.com/socialrealtors to http://www.facebook.com/RealEstateReferralGroup. I know that both Jonathan Rivera & the members are very happy to have the group back up & running.  His status update stating: “We’re Back” has been welcomed openly with over 75 comments at this time.

If you are wondering why the page was shut down, read here as we helped break the news yesterday.  I personally am very suprised about this, and wonder if this just opens a can of worms for Facebook and pages & profiles in the future.  Imagine if only 3% of the 400+ million pages on Facebook want/need to change usernames.   That is 12 Million changes that someone at facebook would have to do basically manually.  I understand their rule of not changing the usernames clearly.  They set this so that someone with a large group isn’t able to just sell it off to someone else, and also keep them from having to deal with a lot of extra work on the platforms.

I will be interested to see what this does as we move forward.  Will this become a trend at Facebook? Or is this just an exception to the rule?  What do you think?




Jeremy Blanton

Jeremy Blanton is the Co-Founder of 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors. He is a social media speaker who shares with thousands of people each year on things like how to use Facebook for Business, Blogging, and How to use Twitter.

When he is not coaching or speaking, he spends most of his time working on Custom WordPress Sites for his clients.

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  • http://www.real-techguy.com Jonathan

    First off, I wanted to thank you for spreading the word about this Jeremy.

    I think this is really an exception to the rule because of the support we had in the community. In doing some research I think one of the main reasons they don’t change these URLs is because it would screw up the web

    We use permalinks to make the web easy to use, if we start changing links everywhere the web would be broken.

  • http://210consulting.com Jeremy Blanton

    Jonathan- I definitely think you were an exception to the rule which for your sake I am glad. I can definitely see Facebook’s stance in that they don’t want to get stuck changing all those usernames because like I said & you also mentioned in your comment, it would be a nightmare for permalinks & a more than full time job for a quite a large staff.

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