In the past 24 hours Facebook started allowing people to claim custom URLs, using their real names, for their personal Facebook profiles.

This will make searching and finding people on the Facebook social network easier, especially when searching for a person whose Facebook profile has been indexed by a search engine like Google.

In the first three minutes, about 200,000 people claimed their usernames. After fifteen minutes, Facebook users had chosen half a million custom URLs. After one hour, over 1 million people on Facebook had claimed usernames.

From the numbers you can see that this URL service has been very popular with Facebook users and should make people searches online that much easier for people who are trying to find old friends, coworkers and family.

Source: Mashable.com