Facebook members grab more than 3 Mn names

BANGALORE, INDIA: The popular social networking site Facebook, which recently announced a new feature enhancement to the site that enables users to personalize their domain name or URL, said more than 3 million people registered user names in the first 12 hours after the social-networking site offered members the chance to claim a personalized Internet address.

Within 15 minutes, more than 500,000 user names were assigned, a Bloomberg report quoted Facebook spokesperson Larry Yu as saying. About one million were registered in the first hour, he said.

This new feature would enable users connect to their friends, family etc by entering the username as part of the URL in their browser.

“The one place, though, where your identity wasn't reflected was in the Web address for your profile or the Facebook Pages you administer,” said a blog on the Facebook website.

For example, the earlier URL, " would be now changed with a name personalized web address like ' if your name is John.

As per the media reports, this move by Facebook had been already launched by its rival MySpace.

There are few glitches too for this new feature such as any name less than five letters is not accepted, and its difficult to get names as according the user wishes.