Facebook vanity URLs top 1 million within an hour, 3 million on first night
The Great Facebook Land Rush went off last night, declared a success by the company.
Mashable has some nice stats on how the Facebook namespace grab went last night (and live coverage from inside the Facebook engineering war room, including the above pic):
- First 3 minutes: 200,000 usernames registered
- First 15 minutes: 500,000 usernames registered
- First hour: 1 million usernames registered
- First 14 hours: 3 million usernames registered
All in all, pretty impressive for a Friday night internet land rush. I snagged the exciting and surely uncontested facebook.com/barb.dybwad, which Obsessable alum Jordan Running notes is identical to facebook.com/barbdybwad — apparently the dot is irrelevant.
Did you grab the name you wanted, or were you the victim of the terrible scourge of Facesquatting?
This story around the web:
- Trusted sources:
Facebook: Over 3 Million Usernames Claimed [mashable.com]
-
Terms of Service [bloomberg.com]
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Comments (2)
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Darren Chan
(9:21 PM on Sat Jun 13, 2009)
Hey Barb, Facebook strips out the periods / full stops when they direct the vanity URL to your profile. You can have as many periods / full stops throughout your name as you want. I jokingly told my friends that I grabbed http://www.facebook.com/........d.A.R.r.e.N.C.h.A.N.....
Anyway, the numbers to me sound kind of low don't they? I mean if there are more than 200 million active users, and 100 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day, 3% of daily users is considered a success? And some of those were 'pages' not user vanity URLs correct?
I wonder how many vanity URLs were given out prior to the Saturday morning land rush and if those were included with the reported numbers. I assume they didn't give out all that many prior to the land rush so it might be negligible.
Barb Dybwad
(11:07 AM on Tue Jun 16, 2009)
Good question. I think the mitigating factors were that it was still a Friday night for one, and for another I'm sure a huge percentage of users don't really care what the heck their URL is or know why it might be important (now or later). Geeks are far more well-versed in the concept of namespace, and are far more likely to actually be linking their profiles from somewhere else.
I'd be curious to see some follow-up stats from the past few days now that all those "once per day" log-ins have had a chance to me prompted a few times...