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Developer Note: Facebook Changing ID Formats
January 5th, 2009
Facebook’s Platform team tonight posted a note letting developers know that due to “a significant increase in user growth and engagement” due to internationalization and Facebook Connect, user IDs will move from 32 to 64 bits in the upcoming months. Apparently, 4.2 billion IDs (the amount of possible 32 bit numbers) is not enough! In addition, the format for photo IDs and album IDs will be changing too.
As Facebook scales its service to handle large volumes of user data, it will need to make slight changes like this from time to time. Hopefully, this will not cause a headache for too many developers.
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January 5th, 2009 at 9:10 pm
Is this an unnecessary move? 64% of the worlds population on facebook? I have to assume something else is using these id’s other then actual users.
January 6th, 2009 at 12:19 am
Reminds me of the time when we increased, back home, the number of digits for phone numbers.
Still, like commented earlier I would assume that 4.2 billion combinations representing a sizable portion of the world population would be enough, if not then something else is done with those IDs.
January 6th, 2009 at 8:25 am
I understand the need for bigger numbers since users and pages are under the same numbering system. Maybe even events and groups.
Photos are not, but they are switching Photo IDs from an integer to a string! This is going to be a pain if your app stores photo IDs.