Thank you for your comment Mahesh! I agree, an option to select a username or register with a custom URL will be more convenient. But it seems Google’s actual plan has yet to be unveiled. Did you read “Custom URLs are free for now, but we may start charging a fee for them.”? (http://www.google.com/intl/en/+/policy/tos-custom-url.html) It’ll be interesting to see how brands/individuals choose to use the custom URLs considering it sounds like Google may begin charging for you to have them in the future. But lets see how it goes.

Hi Kyle, The option to request a different URL appears when you are pre-approved for a URL matching your profile. However, in some cases the option is not available because either the pre-approved URL is an exact match or the profile is not active enough. To answer your question: Though the requirement for custom URL is ‘at least 10 followers’, more followers give you more authority. Hope this helps!