San Francisco, June 20: Facebook, the most-popular social networking site, said 5.75 million people registered user names in the two days after the company let members claim a personalised internet address.
Facebook, which has more than 200 million users worldwide, began accepting registrations at midnight on June 13, on a first-come, first-served basis. Within 15 minutes, more than 500,000 user names had been assigned, said Larry Yu, a spokesman for the Palo Alto, California-based company. More than three million registered in the first 12 hours, he said.
“It’s rewarding to see so many people are interested in getting a user name,” Yu said. While traffic to the site was higher than usual, the feature’s introduction went smoothly, he said.
Facebook said personalised addresses will make it easier to find people. Users can direct friends to a simplified web address, such as http://www.facebook.com/username. Previously, those addresses had strings of letters and numbers. The change also makes it easier to find Facebook members through search engines such as Google.
Separately, Facebook hired Greg Badros from Google to head engineering, Yu said. Badros, Google’s senior director of engineering, was responsible from 2004 to 2007 for the technology behind the company’s AdSense platform, which lets third-party sites show ads sold by Google, according to Badros’s website.
“Greg is one of the most accomplished engineering talents at Google, and it’s wonderful that he has decided to bring these talents to Facebook,” Yu said.
“We wish Greg well,” said Matt Furman, a Google spokesman, said.
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 per cent this year, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said in April.
“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 US in April, with people spending an average of about 169 minutes at the site, according to ComScore, a research firm in Reston, Virginia. That compares with 172 minutes at Google, 290 minutes at Yahoo! and 233 minutes at News Corp’s MySpace, ComScore said.
Facebook, whose backers include Microsoft and venture-capital firm Accel Partners, received a $200 million (Dh734 million) investment last month from Russian firm Digital Sky Technologies, valuing the company at $10 billion (Dh36.7 billion).
—Agencies—