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.

While that sounds like a huge number, I wonder if it really is.  Later in the article, they add a denominator on to that fact — there are about 200 million people registered on Facebook.  So, a little more than 1% of people “rushed” to nab their own vanity URL this weekend.

Its in alignment with some of the friends / family on Facebook, actually, where most people had no idea that it was Friday, but most, really having no idea, and a substantial proportion of them asking “but why does it matter?”

I think it begs the larger question of the importance and awareness of reputation management on the Internet — specifically realizing how important it is to own your own Google Search results (particularly if you have a reputation and profession you care about), how Facebook ranks in all of that (can rank quite high), and how a Facebook vanity URL containing keywords might in turn rank (again, theoretically high).  But that’s really a post for another time.