The Facebook land grab starts midnight Eastern time this Saturday. That’s when Facebook will allow its more than 200 million users to personalize the URLs for their profiles. Vanity URLs will make it much easier to find people and brands on Facebook via search engines, while potentially boosting its own traffic as well.

Until now, a user’s URL has just been a randomly assigned string of numbers. This contrasts with MySpace which has long allowed bands, for example, to use their names in the URL – i.e., myspace.com/myband.

The new URLs for profiles and Facebook Pages will be offered on a first-come, first-serve basis. That means that come Saturday night, if you want a specific URL you may be left out in the cold if you don’t act quickly enough.

For newspapers, the need is clear: grab that name before someone else does.

There are some caveats for brand pages. If the page was set up after May 31, you won’t be able to claim your name immediately – this is to prevent “squatters” from signing up now. And even if you did sign up before May 31, you need at least 1,000 fans to get a vanity URL. (We expect this to jump start numerous Facebook campaigns encouraging members to “friend” a page – shades of the Ashton Kutcher wars on Twitter all over again.)

Hundreds of vanity URLs have been doled out to celebrities and other prominent people on Facebook. So if you want to claim Barack Obama, you can’t.

The timing is interesting: Twitter just announced that it will be monitoring its own vanity URLs to prevent fake celebrities from posting (see our post here).

Facebook is also barring generic names – so no grabbing Facebook.com/autoclassifieds.

And once you claim a name, there is NO way to change it (short of deleting the page and starting over again). The reason: to thwart a black market from developing around trading vanity URLs.

Let the best brand win!