Facebook began accepting registrations at midnight New York time on June 13, on a first-come, first-served basis. Within 15 minutes, more than 500,000 user names were assigned, said Larry Yu, a spokesman for Palo Alto, California-based Facebook. About 1 million were registered in the first hour, he said.
“Its rewarding to see so many people are interested in getting a user name,” Yu said yesterday in a telephone interview. While traffic to the site was higher than usual, the introduction of the feature went smoothly, he said.
Facebook, the most-popular social-networking site, said the new feature is designed to make it easier to find people. Users that have claimed their names can direct friends to a simplified Web address, such as http://www.facebook.com/username. Previously, those addresses had strings of letters and numbers, making them difficult to remember. The change also makes it easier to find Facebook members through search engines such as Google Inc.
Facebook, founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, is looking for ways to attract users and encourage them to spend more time on the site. The company generates sales by selling advertising. Revenue may climb 70 percent this year, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said in April.
Personal Destination
“Your new Facebook URL is like your personal destination, or home, on the Web,” the company said in a blog posting last week. “We expect to offer even more ways to use your Facebook user name in the future.”
Users concerned about privacy can specify who can see their profile and what material they can view, Facebook said. They can also specify whether profiles are viewable to people searching outside Facebook.
Facebook attracted 67.5 million visitors in the U.S. in April, with people spending an average of about 169 minutes at the site, according to ComScore Inc., a research firm in Reston, Virginia. That compares to 172 minutes at Google, 290 minutes at Yahoo! Inc., and 233 minutes at News Corp.s MySpace, ComScore said.
Facebook, whose backers include Microsoft Corp. and venture-capital firm Accel Partners, received a $200 million investment last month from Russian firm Digital Sky Technologies, valuing the company at $10 billion.