Tiny Biker

November 1, 2005

Fun Facebook trick of the week: some of the Nique photogs saw this demonstrated at the meeting last Thursday. I noticed that the new photos on Facebook are identified by a single numeric ID in the URL. If you visit a photo and change the URL to another random number, you're likely to get a completely random photo from any school, anywhere. While most people post their photos for everyone to see, the hitch is that some IDs are private, and you can't exceed the maximum ID or there won't be photos there yet. Anyway, I made a simple script to help you browse randomly, and you can get the zip file here. Just unzip the two files, log in to Facebook normally, then open "browser.htm". Click "random" to get a new random photo. Pretty often the "random" button will send you to your homepage instead of getting a photo; that means that the photo it tried to access was private. Happy Stalking!

Note: the "maximum" ID coded into the HTML is based on the highest IDs I've seen so far - feel free to open the HTML and edit that value as photos are added to Facebook and you see higher IDs in real life.