web app - User and URL friendly object ids

One normal way to serve a list of items in a web app is like this:

http://example.com/clients

Where the clients part of the url, renders a list of all clients

In previous apps clients had simple ids, that looked OK when you wanted to see more details, like:

http://example.com/clients/82

But now, I have an app where the internal ids looks like this:

http://example.com/clients/A6C1BD51-67C3-66C6-E044-00144FD25BA0

and well... that was the drop that spilled the cup. What should I do to provide user friendly ids?

One option could be generating an alias for each client:

http://example.com/clients/john-smith

Conflict?

http://example.com/clients/john-smith-austin-riverdale

But although the name is not likely to change, the address is a whole different story.

The ugly UID is mandatory, cannot be changed. I could only imagine requesting the software to maintain a secondary ID for permalinks. Should that be the best solution?

I could go back to the beginning, just simple numbers. I still do not like having something that is not human friendly, but it seems that any unique everlasting permalink cannot look nicer.