Gio Gutierrez

Facebook URL Madness

// June 16th, 2009 // Social Media

As you no doubt heard last weekend, the whole Facebook vanity URL grab thing was big. Within seven minutes of the service being available last night, 345,000 users grabbed one. Within 15 minutes, over a half million had, Facebook spokesperson Larry Yu told Bloomberg. Within one hour, over 1 million Facebook usernames had been snapped up.

Facebook was worried that traffic would be so high that Facebook could overload. What numbers am I talking about?

- It took 3 minutes to reach 200,000 usernames registered. That’s an astounding 1111+ registered per second during the first minutes of the feature release.

- After 15 minutes, the number of usernames jumped to 500,000. The pace slowed down, but there is no laughing at 555.5 usernames or so taken per second. How many other websites could handle that type of load?

- By 10:01 PM PT, a full hour after release, around one million custom URLs had been claimed. That’s an average of 278 usernames per second or so.

- Where do Facebook usernames stand now? Well, as of 2:00 PM ET, over 3 million usernames have been taken. That’s 3,000,000 custom URLs during a Friday night.

And of course, not everyone was happy with the results of the landgrab (see pic below). Not surprisingly, people are already trying to sell their Facebook vanity URLs as well. The service Assetize, already has 4 accounts for sale. The accounts listed are: cotman, pokerbook, sexybook and shekhar. The listing amount for each is “best offer” — none have any bids.