Facebook Vanity URL Username Attracts 3 Million Users Within 12 hours

Facebook has announced that over three million users have already registered vanity URLs within first 12 hours of the launch of the new feature over the weekend.

Interestingly, Facebook's hottest new feature could give rise to Facesquatting, the possibility of a third-party registering a coveted username. More than 200 million people are registered on Facebook which means that within the first few hours, around 2 percent of the userbase have managed to get hold of a username.

The social networking giant started accepting registrations of personalised URLs on 13 June, enabling users to link their profiles on the website with the web addresses containing usernames of their choice, along with the standard numbers-based URL.

The figures from the company revealed that around 500,000 users had registered a personalised URL within 15 minutes of the introduction of the feature, with the count impressively raised to one million within an hour and climbed up to three millions in 12 hours.

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Larry Yu, a spokesman for the company said, “It’s rewarding to see so many people are interested in getting a user name”; in addition to this, he further notified that the website handled the massive traffic successfully and the introduction of the feature went quite smoothly.

Facebook snared the second spot as the most popular website in the UK, as per the figures released by Hitwise, with the social networking portal accounted for 4.57 percent of the total web visits in the UK.

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Our Comments
The vanity URL could prove to be the first step by Facebook to launch a Twitter like service fairly soon. Google as well launched a similar feature back in April, which was known as Google Profile service. Everyone therefore, seems to be particularly aware of Twitter's impact and gearing up to the challenge.

Related Links
Facebook users snap up vanity URLs
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3 million Facebook usernames registered in 12 hours
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Millions of Facebook users grab personal profile addresses
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Millions Sign Up for Facebook Username
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Facebook Members Grab More Than 3 Million Names Within Hours
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