

The Faces of Facebook – Visualizing 1.2 billion Facebook profile images - dshankar
http://app.thefacesoffacebook.com/

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31reasons
Its not "Visualizing". Its called fetching random images.

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

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

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SurfScore
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?

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forinti
There's even a [https://www.facebook.com/NaN](https://www.facebook.com/NaN) :)

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getdavidhiggins
Also:
[https://www.facebook.com/window.location.href](https://www.facebook.com/window.location.href)

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babby
For some reason
[https://www.facebook.com/undefined](https://www.facebook.com/undefined) is
different from a regular 404 like
[https://www.facebook.com/null](https://www.facebook.com/null)

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sytelus
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 :).

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skwirl
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.

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lifeformed
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?

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geekrax
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.

~~~
MildlySerious
And on day 41 the browser crashes. Oh well.

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

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shortstuffsushi
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.

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hnha
or maybe they did but their friends were not interested.

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Tichy
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?

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Sprint
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.

~~~
Tichy
No rate limits?

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Andrenid
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.

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

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Skywing
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.

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murtali
[http://i.imgur.com/mqct6hZ.png](http://i.imgur.com/mqct6hZ.png) Where it all
started zoom

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etaihugi
[http://www.millionsinglesproject.com/](http://www.millionsinglesproject.com/)

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

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phwd
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]](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.

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

~~~
whackedspinach
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.

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

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D9u
This a good example of why I don't use Facebook, although I do like the
premise here.

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

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unclebucknasty
Most of those were people who just look like penises.

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timedoctor
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.

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

~~~
nkg
Oh, an ass.

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

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Aqueous
Yeah...

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

