There is a custom URL feature for plus accounts. Eg. https://google.com/+YourFullName. I guess, they are reserving the urls for unique names. I got mine https://google.com/+AlokMandavgane

Google is arguably the most web-focused company in the world (the other contender being Mozilla). So how the hell did they manage to screw up something as basic as URLs on Google+? (I've always liked the elegance of twitter.com/username)

Even worse, when they assigned "good" URLs they gave this horrendous preference to .coms and didn't allow any changes.

For instance, say there's an empty domain at yourbusiness.com, but you're operating on yourbusiness.co.uk, the domain you get is the horrendous "yourbusinesscouk". whilst "yourbusiness" goes completely unused.

Jerks.

You may have missed this: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/you-can-now-finally-get-a-vanit...

It doesn't matter. At this point, the web is already polluted with millions of horrible URLs that will/should never change.