I’m not a major fan of Facebook. There, I said it.  I particularly hate stupid groups, and stupid apps. But from time to time, I find myself needing to fan a page or install an app that someone has asked me to take a look at. I usually just grin and bear it; adding the app, testing its features (or lack thereof), and then uninstall and get the hell out of Dodge. I thought it might be a good idea to create a dummy Facebook account for just these purposes, so that I wouldn’t need to go through the above each time, and the process of creating a new account led to some interesting finds about the Facebook sign-up process which I thought I’d share:

• You can’t use the same email address to register multiple accounts. Fairly obvious I guess, but you never know unless you give it a try :)

• Facebook doesn’t allow the email address you register with to contain the plus symbol (+), even though it’s a valid character for the local-part of an email address (Dominic Sayers tells you why here, plus he provides a nifty RFC-compliant validator). Why is that important? If, like me, you find yourself registering multiple accounts with a website like Facebook or Twitter, it’s impractical to have to create new email addresses for each account. If you have a Gmail account, you can take advantage of the way they handle the plus symbol to create the appearance of multiple email addresses based on the one account. This is because Gmail essentially sees the addresses myname@gmail.com and myname+randomtext@gmail.com as one and the same, effectively ignoring everything after the plus symbol (actually, they go one step further and auto-label any incoming email with the text after the plus, which is nice). The upshot of this is that you can use the one Gmail account to register for multiple accounts on a site, such as Twitter. I use my primary address, followed by the plus, then add a string describing the account. No matter how many of these ‘fake’ addresses you use, Gmail will keep sending the emails to the ‘primary’ inbox. This is massively useful, but, as I mentioned, Facebook don’t allow it. What gives Facebook?

• They also have some really odd rules about the first names and surnames they consider acceptable. For example, you can only have a maximum of two capital letters in your surname. Which sucks if your surname is McCarthy-Smith or O’Connell-Jones. If LinkedIn allows these names, why not Facebook as well? Why these arbitrary rules? Are Facebook setting themselves up as some kind of surname authority? Feels like lazy coding to me.  On a side note, you also can’t register if your firstname happens to be ‘facebook’ or ‘microsoft’. ‘ebay’ is allowed, alongside a certain c-word coined by an outrageous Corkonian.

So there you go – three things you may possibly already have known about Facebook, but which I didn’t up until this point :)

P.S. I still haven’t actually got around to registering that dummy account… #mefail