Knowing Your Facebook Number Might Be Pointless, But Here’s How To Find It Anyway

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In a world where people will post anything from “What Weather Phenomenon Are You?” (I’m a cirrus cloud!) to “Which Journey Song (From The Steve Perry Years, Of Course) Are You?” on Facebook, there’s no doubt that you’ve seen posts touting your so-called “Facebook Number,” ostensibly, the number that designates when you became a user. But what’s the point?

The short answer is, there probably is none, besides slapping it up on your Facebook status and calling it a day. And despite the fact that you can use a simple trick to find this ID number, it doesn’t mean that if you’re No. 820,597 that you were the 820,597th person to join Facebook, ever, points out Mashable.

Here’s how you find it, in two easy, yet pointless steps:

1. Go to your Facebook profile

2. Replace “www” in the URL with “graph.”

Facebook will then spit out something like “id”: “820597.”

That happens to be close to my number, but it doesn’t mean I was the 820,597th person to join Facebook. That’s impossible, actually, because the site hit its one millionth user in December 2004, before I joined in 2005.

See, at first Facebook grouped members sequentially by the order in which their college or university joined, starting with numbers 0-99,999 for students at Harvard, where Mark Zuckerberg (user No. 3) attended when he founded Facebook. Columbia was the second school to gain access to Facebook, where its users got numbers starting with a 1, so it would follow that 100,001 was the first ID number for that school’s first user.

So this just means that my school was the 83rd school to join Facebook, and I was around the 597th person from my college to join.

And if you want to find out find out where you fall in the whole scheme of things — were you the 1,567,697th to join? The 34,578th? There’s no way to find that out, a Facebook spokesman tells Consumerist.

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

Now you know. Do with it what you will — refuse to date anyone with a significantly higher or lower number, splash it all over your wall, whatever… but it’s basically pointless. Or you could just go back to making those Facebook photo movies everyone seems to enjoy enough to fill my newsfeed with them all day, everyday.

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist