I was playing around with FriendCSV, which exports data on your Facebook friends into a format that can be imported into any number of applications. It’s cool, but the only worthwhile information are birthdays (Facebook, taking the black-hole approach to data retention, doesn’t let out essential contact information)… and the user IDs of all your friends.
Quick lesson for non-geeks: All electronic data, including, say, a user’s profile, is almost always assigned a unique number, usually starting from 0. That number is used to represent “you” in other places in the application, when you make posts, add content, interact with other user’s, etc. Therefore, the information, in this case, a user, that has the lowest id number assigned to it was the first to sign up among your friends.
A quick excel sort showed the order in which all my friends signed up on Facebook. It follows how Facebook opened up, in general (it’s not perfect, due to segmenting). My childhood friend Rafi is the first one I know to sign up, followed by the other kids I know at Harvard – Facebook was founded there. Then, my friends in other colleges. Finally, all my Maryland friends. And on and on. Last is one of my Canadian cousins, who is in high school. Pretty neat to see. There’s some aspect of geek cred by having a low number, on anything. It shows you were there first. In some cases, as with ICQ, it meant your contact information was easier to memorize (ICQ had no screennames, everyone talked to each other using those id numbers). Even, years later, AOL Instant Messenger still keeps track of who signed up when, you just need to download Pidgin to view that.
