Since there's no official announcement from Facebook at this time, it's hard to know why they've decided to give users another chance to pick their names. Maybe they took pity on folks like this guy whose "friends" pranked him by selecting an...errr...rather interesting username for him. Or perhaps they just saw the ridiculous choices people were making and realized that these people probably had no idea that what they were creating would be permanent...as in etched in stone on the internet forever and ever. Or maybe they simply took pity on the moms and dads and grandparents joining Facebook who now had to all of a sudden discover that their kids weren't as clean-cut and innocent as they once thought.

But for whatever reason, those regretting their username choice now have the opportunity for a "do-over." But Facebook warns, "Choose your new username carefully. You can only change your username once." We're not sure if we believe them this time.

Thanks to FBHive for this tip.

About this time last year Google's Brad Fitzpatrick, also the creator of OpenID, led the development of the Google Social Graph API. It's a search engine for all the webpages that we identify as profiles online and it tracks the connections between pages linked together for a single person. At a small event today in Sebastapol, California, British developer Glenn Jones demonstrated the most compelling tool I've seen yet for leveraging this powerful technology.

The data that gets displayed can be frightening if you've exposed more information about yourself than you'd like on a rel="me" linked page. Or it can be disappointing if you're someone who wants a well developed web presence but haven't linked profile pages up well. Perhaps tools like Identify will prompt some people to change the way they profile themselves.

We've been using another interface built by Martin Atkins for some time and this weekend we saw an even more sophisticated option offered to customers of social media ping server service Gnip. That there are a lot of smart people working on this and offering up even early solutions to a hungry group of users underlines further how valuable social graph search is.

Brad Fitzpatrick wrote extensively about the prospects and importance of the social graph in 2007, while the wheels were turning. He's at the same event this weekend (Social Web FOO Camp) where Jones presented his experimental project but says he hasn't seen it yet. He's very excited to learn about a serious user interface for the service, though, and told us that the Social Graph API is about to ramp up its efforts substantially.

Obviously privacy, web user education and proper support for metadata are all discussions that need to go on, but there's already a lot of data available and connected.

You can download Jones's plug-in for Firefox now or grab this related bookmarklet to click on any profile page: social graph explorer

A nice clickable end-user interface is only the beginning of what could be done by this kind of standards-based cross site people-search. Mark up your profile pages well, folks, it's time to use our data smartly!