The Faces of Facebook – Visualizing 1.2 billion Facebook profile images | Hacker News Reader

The Faces of Facebook – Visualizing 1.2 billion Facebook profile images

app.thefacesoffacebook.com

96 pointsdshankar47 comments

Its not "Visualizing". Its called fetching random images.

That was my reaction, too. I was expecting something more than a random pixel map.

also, it's slow as shit when you drill down to a subselection of 'faces'

So apparently the app works because you can access someone's facebook page with the URL www.facebook.com/"#". With the number being the numbered profile they are.

Its curious, however, that Zuck is actually number 4 (www.facebook.com/4), numbers 1-3 are missing. I wonder why?

I see Zuck as #1, Moskowitz as #3 and so on...

Click on the picture, it links to "facebook.com/4" (=zuckerberg), etc. There are several gaps in between the first 50 ID numbers. Probably some early test/fake accounts as well as people who deleted/deactivated their account. Eduardo Saverin (co-founder) has id 41 and Joe Green has 42.

There's even a https://www.facebook.com/NaN :)

Also: https://www.facebook.com/window.location.href

For some reason https://www.facebook.com/undefined is different from a regular 404 like https://www.facebook.com/null

Source, Dustin Moskovitz: 1-3 were accounts used to test registration. Evidently it only took Mark 3 tries to clear the bugs. Link: http://qr.ae/NMpX6 (Does not require login)

So FB allows to GET 1.2B profile images without getting blocked? If so, is using that data legal? If so, how can I get my hands on it :).

It's pretty simple:

graph.facebook.com/[integer]/picture?type=large

Your browser is doing the GETting. Bring up the network tab in your browser's dev console and zoom in. I was a little worried about getting blocked myself just from playing around on that page.

I'm not sure what I'm looking at here... all I see is a giant zoomable grid of chromatic noise. Is it supposed to be showing peoples pictures or something?

same here i was expecting to see actual profile images..

You do, if you zoom in.

Use your scroll wheel to zoom in (like Google Maps) or click in an area and it'll zoom in.

I thought that at first, but then the faces started loading finally. You do have to be zoomed in for that to occur.

A facebook profile picture of smallest dimension (50px X 50px) will have minimum size of 3 kb.. So, if this site will show real profile pics all together, it'll have to load almost 3.5 TB of data for 1.2 billion pictures.. A connection with 100Kb/s downloading speed will take around 430 days, and a connection with 1MB/s will take around 42 days..

I don't think anyone would be interested to spend more than 2 minutes on this page.

Google Maps

And on day 41 the browser crashes. Oh well.

I had to unblock Facebook Connect in Ghostery and AdBlock before it worked.

Idle curiosity for the mathfolk, by clicking somewhere at random what's the chances of getting your own picture to load?

Interestingly, the first 14 "members," or at least images, are male. I'm not immediately familiar with the early development team of Facebook, but it appears that they didn't start sharing with their female friends immediately.

or maybe they did but their friends were not interested.

Can't load the page. But I wonder, is it possible to grab all Facebook profile pictures (or at least the public ones), or were they given special access for research purposes?

Your browser is doing the downloading. The URLs are available from the API (I changed random characters):

  $ curl -I https://graph.facebook.com/100000624321700/picture
  HTTP/1.1 302 Found

(...)

  Location: https://fbcdn-profile-a.akamaihd.net/hprofile-ak-prn1/573867_100000621711234_930571234_q.jpg

Then it is just a matter of incrementing the number. This might be a fun research project.

well don't forget that they are also using the api to get the full_name of users

No rate limits?

After zooming in to 2 different areas and dragging it around for a bit, I now don't get images and I just get a popup asking me to log in to Facebook whenever I try zoom in anywhere.

Definitely rate limits. They should probably be proxying the requests and caching the images.

Working for me. Shows pictures, names and profile number. If you scroll to the top left you can browse all of the first users of Facebook. Pretty neat.

http://i.imgur.com/mqct6hZ.png Where it all started zoom

http://www.millionsinglesproject.com/

The real question is - does this have the image from the profile I requested that they delete over 1.5 years ago?

If you have the id or username, then you can check for yourself with a simple HTTP GET to https://graph.facebook.com/[Number/username]. Seeing that this app uses the Graph API to request accounts, I highly doubt it will be able to see any residual/soft delete data Facebook might hold for you.

I found my profile account number and it works for the graph link but I am not that number on the site

The number on this site refers to the profile picture. Some people have multiple profile pictures over time, and some have deleted their account, etc. Example: Zuck is 1 on this page but his FBID is 4.

So #1 is Mark's picture from back then and he and everyone else would be in the page multiple times.

This a good example of why I don't use Facebook, although I do like the premise here.

I was quite surprised by the [edit: relatively] prodigious amount of penises.

Most of those were people who just look like penises.

The app doesn't work. When you scroll up and down through the images it stops showing you new faces. The faces are not all there, it's a trick, just has a few hundred facebook profiles in there, does not have all 1.2 billion.

I clicked 3 zones before finding myself in front of a dick pic.

Oh, an ass.

Interesting to see a lot of Harvard grads on row #1 indeed.

Yeah...

No, you're right, you're totally significant.

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