June 14 (Bloomberg) -- Facebook Inc., the world’s largest social-networking site, said more than 3 million members registered user names by yesterday morning after it offered people the chance to claim a personalized Web address.

Facebook began accepting registrations at midnight New York time on June 13 on a first-come, first-served basis. Within the first 15 minutes, more than 500,000 user names were assigned and about 1 million in the first hour, said Larry Yu, a spokesman for Palo Alto, California-based Facebook.

“Traffic was a quite a bit higher than usual,” Yu said in an e-mail. The company was “able to handle this quite smoothly” because of testing and planning before the introduction of the feature, he said.

Facebook, which has more than 200 million users worldwide, allowed users to select one unique name, letting them create a Web address for their Facebook profile, such as http://www.facebook.com/david. Previously, addresses typically contained a sequence of numbers. The aim, Facebook says, is to make it easier to find profiles using search engines such as Google Inc.

Each name needs to be unique, which created a rush among users to snag their preferred names before anyone else.

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 percent this year, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said in April.

To contact the reporter on this story: Dan Hart in Washington at dahart@bloomberg.net; Brian Womack in San Francisco at bwomack1@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: June 14, 2009 12:06 EDT