Tomorrow night may be a late one for some Facebook users.
The world’s largest social-networking site is offering people the chance to claim a personalised Web address beginning at midnight New York time on a first-come, first-served basis. The plan’s announcement two days ago sparked a frenzy among users planning to grab their names.
David Whittemore, 25, typically hangs out at bars on Friday nights with his friends. This week, he’ll be at his computer, ready to take his name when the clock strikes midnight.
“It’s going to be a land grab,” said Whittemore, who works for a finance startup in New York. “I’m definitely going to be staying home.”
Facebook Inc. is allowing users to select one name per person, letting them create a Web address for their Facebook profile, such as http://www.facebook.com/david. At the moment, addresses typically contain a sequence of numbers. The aim, Facebook says, is to make it easier to find profiles using search engines such as Google Inc. If someone else has already snagged your name, you’re out of luck. And once users confirm the name they want, it can’t be changed. Jacquie Brennan, a 57-year-old attorney in Houston, says she’s trying for the name “iJac,” because she’s a fan of Apple Inc. products. If she can’t get that, she’ll settle for “MoreMerlot.”
“You can bet that if everyone else has a cool name, I am going to have one too,” said Brend in Palo Alto, California, says it can’t predict how many people will hit the site requesting their names. “We have taken steps to take a look at the infrastructure and put the necessary pieces in place to make sure the service isn’t affected,” said Larry Yu, a spokesman for the company.
Facebook attracted 67.5 million users in April, making it the eighth-most visited Web site in the US, according to ComScore Inc, a research firm in Reston, Virginia. The site lets people share photos, post updates on what they’re doing, and send messages to each other. After people have set their user names, they have the option to publish it in their “stream,” or the rolling list of updates they share with friends, Facebook said.
The rush to grab user names harks back to the early days of the Internet, when squatters would take domain names and try to sell them at a profit, said Dan Neely, chief executive officer of Networked Insights, a Madison, Wisconsin-based firm that advises companies on how to promote themselves on social- networking sites.
“You remember the days of folks buying random domains because they thought they were going to be able to sell them for massive amounts of money? It’s going to be like that,” Neely said.
Facebook is taking steps to prevent squatting. Users won’t be able to transfer their names to others. The company will also only allow users to claim a name if they had an account before the feature was announced June 9, according to its Web site. This will prevent people from creating new accounts just to grab their addresses, Facebook said. That restriction lifts on June 28.
The excitement from users rushing to register their names could have been a moneymaking opportunity for Facebook, said Charlene Li, founder of Altimeter Group, a San Mateo, California-based research firm that specializes in social technology.
“The question is: How come Facebook isn’t charging for this?” Li said. “They could make some money on it.”
Facebook, whose investors include Microsoft Corp and venture-capital firm Accel Partners, was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 as a social-networking service for his classmates at Harvard University. The company generates sales through advertising, and expects revenue to climb 70 per cent this year, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said in April.
“We think offering the feature for free is in the best interest of the vast majority of users,” Facebook’s Yu said.
Facebook received a $200 million investment last month from Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies, valuing the company at $10 billion. Companies are increasingly seeing social networks as a way to build their brands because of the number of people on them, Digital Sky partner Alexander Tamas said at a conference in Carlsbad, California, last month.
Twitter Inc, the San Francisco-based social-networking service that lets people type short updates to their friends, already offers Web addresses that include user names.
