Facebook starts digital turf rush

SAN FRANCISCO -- Like concertgoers lined up for a coveted ticket, Facebook users queued up over the weekend to claim their digital turf.

Late Friday and early Saturday, the world's largest social-networking site began offering its 200 million users the chance to claim a personalized Web address on a first-come, first-served basis.

Within 15 minutes, 500,000 users had grabbed a name, the company said.

The move allows them to create a distinct online address for their personal profile with a name of their choosing, such as facebook.com/jonswartz.

It also lets them use their Facebook page like a personal home page, as a vast majority of members of rival MySpace already do.

The late-night change (12:01 a.m. ET Saturday) had some anxious Facebook members changing their Friday-night plans to grab their name before someone else did.

"As a sole proprietor, it is very important to me," says Scott Roewer, a professional organizer in Washington, D.C., who uses Facebook and Twitter to promote his business. "I have no choice but to sign up at midnight."

Facebook member Bryan Christmas, 27, wanted to be sure he had Internet access at 9:01 p.m. PT in San Francisco, altering his weekend plans for a few precious minutes.

The intent of so-called vanity URLs is to make it easier to find profiles through Web searches, says Facebook. Until now, Facebook profiles contained a sequence of numbers.

Once someone snags a name, no one else can use it. And after that name is confirmed, it cannot be changed.

The lure of vanity URLs might lead, in some cases, to courtroom disputes over trademark rights, say legal experts.

One possible scenario is a third-party improperly registering the name of a celebrity or brand name.

"It could be a quagmire," says Howard Weller, a trademark attorney in New York who represents celebrities. "We could have another case of cybersquatting," when squatters claimed domain names during the early years of the Internet in an attempt to sell them at a profit.

Last week, baseball manager Tony La Russa sued social-networking site Twitter, claiming someone else created an account in his name.