Is it really important?

Yes, It is a bit. http://example.com and http://www.example.com are similar pages for a visitor, not for search engines, those are two different pages.  So what? take a little time to read this article : you already know that reference by other sites (backlinks) increase importance of your pages, given by Google, for example. Commonly (even if it's a little more complicated), we know that the more there are backlinks, the more the page looks important to search engine as Google. Two different url implicate that numbers of backlinks could be half-divided... And more : two pages with similar content and different url are considered as duplicate content. One of the Google parameter doesn't appreciate duplicate content.

So it's doubly your advantage to choose only one of this url, and redirect the other to the first, for example, with a 301 redirect in your file .htaccess (if you have rights for proceedings), this solution is the best because it will be active for all search engines. Since a few month, there a second tool provided by Google, that allow you to choose only one page as your site's root. Process is a quite simple, go to your webmaster tools (in your google account) :

Select your webmaster tool board, tab "utils", then "define your favorite domain". Choose your most appropriate option (generally, no www for subdomains, www for root domain). For most of the services, as blogger, that provide directly subdomains, this option may be automatically set.

If you don't use google webmasters tools, or if you can choose, prefer the 301 redirect issue. This will informe and redirect automatically all searching bots and visitors. 

Apache guide related to Url Rewriting

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