Facebook Inc, the larges social-networking site, said members registered user names at a rate of more than 550 a second in the 15 minutes after the company offered people the chance to claim personalized Web addresses.
Facebook started accepting registrations at midnight in New York on a first-come, first-served basis. Within the first seven minutes, 345,000 people had claimed user names, said Larry Yu, a spokesman for Palo Alto, California-based Facebook. Within 15 minutes, 500,000 users had grabbed a name.
“We saw high traffic, higher than usual traffic,” Yu said. “Planning allowed us to handle that traffic well.”
Facebook, which has more than 200 million users worldwide, allowed users to select one unique name, letting them create a Web address for their Facebook profile, such as www.facebook.com/david.
Previously, addresses typically contained a sequence of numbers. The aim, Facebook says, is to make it easier to find profiles using search engines such as Google Inc.
Each name needs to be unique, which created a rush among users to snag their preferred names before anyone else.
Shirley Ong, a 26-year-old marketing manager in Singapore, said her palms were sweaty as she counted down the final seconds before she could choose a user name. A friend in Toronto and her brother in Vancouver were also logged on to Facebook to claim their names, she said.
After the clock struck noon in Singapore, someone had already grabbed “Shirley.” Ong settled for her full name. She said she’s not too disappointed.
“It was a really funny experience,” Ong said. “Sadly, this is also the most fun I have had all week — counting down and waiting to register my name.”
Facebook lets people share photos, post updates on what they’re doing and send messages to each other. After users have set their new name, they have the option to publish it in their “stream,” or the rolling list of updates they share with friends, Facebook said.
Facebook said it encouraged individuals or companies that have intellectual-property rights to their names to contact the site to reserve or protect them.
The company is taking steps to prevent so-called squatting — users signing up for names just to prevent someone else from having them. Users can’t transfer their names to other accounts.
The company will also only allow users to claim a name if they had an account before the feature was announced on June 9.
This will prevent people from creating new accounts just to grab their addresses, Facebook said. That restriction will be lifted on June 28.
Facebook says it has more than 200 million active users around the world.
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