• Bloomberg, Monday, June 15, 2009 2:15 PM

More than 3 million Facebook users registered for usernames in the first 12 hours after the social network allowed them to create easy-to-find, personalized Web pages, the company said.

"It's rewarding to see so many people are interested in getting a user name," Facebook spokesman Larry Yu said yesterday in a telephone interview with Bloomberg. While traffic to the site was higher than usual, he said the introduction of the feature went smoothly.

The idea behind the new names and addresses is to simplify locating friends on the site. Previously the URL for one's Facebook page consisted of a long, cryptic combination of numbers and letter, but users who took advantage of the free feature were given pages with simple URLs, such as Facebook.com/mediapost.

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