The Great Facebook Rush occured over the weekend, as the site opened the floodgates for unique username registrations.

If this is the first you’ve heard of it, bad luck. Get used to being facebook.com/827430mvmhd9mdleek3.

I briefly considered waking up at the crack of dawn to snag matthew.sparkes, but I opted instead for a few hours more sleep.

To the man with the well-trimmed beard who got there first, enjoy. I certainly enjoyed my lay-in.

“Think carefully about the username you choose. Once it’s been selected, you won’t be able to change or transfer it,” warned Facebook.

Well, people did think carefuly. And the results were chaotic, stupid and entertaining in equal measure. Here are some of the high/lowlights.

Religion – Facebook had the foresight to block a few potentially controversial registrations; “God” and “Allah” were off limits, for example, although “Buddah” went to a chap named Mike Surmanian. Atheist deity-equivalent, “Richard Dawkins“, was also snapped up by a bloke in a mortarboard named Steven Tyrell Stasek.

Technology – Rather brilliantly, Christine Shipley registered “default.aspx“. Some others that Facebook didn’t see coming were “logout” and “resetpassword“.

Swear Words – Not big, not clever, but an obvious first choice for many. Most of the worst I could think of were gone, but some of the more anglicized ones slipped through Facebook’s US-orientated censorship net. Well done to Michael Whittaker for grabbing “bo**ocks“. There’s no way you’ll regret that in a few year’s time, no way.

Politics – Barack’s people, tech-savvy bunch that they are, registered his name nice and early. George Bush was less organised, seamlessly continuing the same lack of planning and foresight he displayed during his presidency into his retirement and letting Dusty Sayer walk off with it.

Facesquatting – Coined on rival website, Twitter, this term refers to registering a name that you think could be worth something to someone else in the future. Stupid for two reasons; it makes people very angry, and usernames are non-transferable. Epic Fail, as they say on the Internet.

Pedantry – My favourite by far belongs to Nick Alexander. If you attempted to register a username that was not long enough you were shown the error message; “usernames must be at least 5 letters long”. Here’s Nick’s username.