Your Facebook ID Number May Not Mean What You Think It Means

10 years ago | Posted in: Technology | 546 Views

On the heels of Facebook’s 10th anniversary, reports circulated about how to find out your Facebook ID, the specific number that was assigned to you when you first joined the site. If you signed up early on, it’s likely a much lower number than if you became a member a year ago.

Soon after, users of course started updating their statuses with claims like “I was the 900,001st user to join Facebook. How about you?”

But your Facebook ID number doesn’t exactly mean what you think it does.

“We assigned numerical blocks in the early days, but today user IDs are not issued sequentially,” a Facebook spokesperson told Mashable. “We draw them from a variety of number ranges.”

To find your Facebook ID number, visit your profile and swap “www” for the word “graph.” For example, instead of http://www.Facebook.com/JohnnyAppleseed55, type in http://graph.Facebook.com/JohnnyAppleseed55. (Note: This is not a real profile page).

I joined Facebook in May 2004, just about three months after the site launched. My Facebook ID is in the 806,000s, and numbers similar to this have been popping up in my news feed all week. Because the platform didn’t hit the million user mark until December 2004, it became suspicious when early adopters were posting numbers Facebook didn’t see for quite awhile later.

What my 806,000-ish Facebook ID number means is that I was around the 6,000th Facebook member to join from NYU — the ninth university added to the social network. The number at the beginning of your Facebook ID correlates to the university at which you signed up.

All Harvard students were given a number based on 0 to 99,999. Columbia was second, so Facebook users who joined through the school’s network likely have a 1 at the start of their Facebook ID. Yale was the third (IDs start with 2). A full list of which schools were added when is available here. Find your school, subtract one and that should be the start of your Facebook ID.

It’s unclear how the numbers increase once it opened the platform up to the public, since you no longer needed to be a college student to join. What we can assume is that, with more than 1.23 billion monthly active users as of Dec. 31, 2013, most recent Facebook ID numbers have gotten rather lengthy.

source: mashable

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