Facebook Almost Auctioned Off User Names
Facebook vice president of technical operations Jonathan Heiliger said the social-networking site originally planned an auction-style format for the process of claiming user names, and it kept the code name “Hammer” even after the company decided to distribute user names on a first-come, first-served basis.
In an interview with GigaOm senior writer Om Malik, Heiliger joked, “We decided to keep the ‘Hammer’ code name because it was going to hammer our site.”
He added that Facebook avoided issues with the rollout by isolating the user-name function from all of its other services, and the company had extra hardware at the ready in case the site’s bandwidth got jammed.
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