550 Facebookers Per Second Vie for New URLs

Facebook’s offer of personalized URLs drew 500,000 members in 15 minutes after midnight today, Bloomberg reports. “We saw higher than usual traffic,” said a spokesman. “Planning allowed us to handle that traffic well.” The feature, designed to make Google searches easier, allows the site’s 200 million users to name the URL attached to their profiles—but analysts say it could backfire.

“Squatting”—users grabbing names to prevent others from having them—may ensue, and companies could feud over vanity URLs. “Facebook is going to spend a lot of time mediating these disputes,” said one attorney. But one eager user in Singapore had no complaints: “It was a really funny experience," she said. "Sadly, this is the most fun I have had all week.”
(More Facebook stories.)