There are a lot of people on Facebook (News - Alert) right now. Some measures figure the numbers of Facebook users measure into the millions and beyond, but a recent item came to light that asked the question of what happened to the very earliest Facebook users. While one of the first 10 users of Facebook is perhaps its biggest name, the first three users of Facebook aren't names at all. The reports suggest that said users aren't even actually people.
Facebook accounts are somewhat unique in that, when a user signs on, said user is given a user ID number unique to that user. The numbers, however, aren't perfectly sequential, and the first million are actually assigned based on university. Harvard users, for example, got numbers 0 through 99999, and other universities were given likewise blocks of numbers. Then the affair was opened up to high school students in September 2005, and the process was changed, only to be changed once more when the field was opened to the entire public.
It would be safe to say that Zuckerberg himself represented user ID number one, but that would be wrong. The first three accounts were designated as “testing accounts,” and therefore don't represent a single human user. Zuckerberg himself, meanwhile, holds the user ID number of four. Directly after comes the co-founders of Facebook, Chris Hughes (News - Alert)—who holds user ID five—and Dustin Moscovitz, user ID six. Hughes went on to run Barack Obama's online campaign and later purchase “The New Republic,” while Moscovitz started a task management software firm known as Asana.
But it wasn't just Facebook staff that joined in the early days. Zuckerberg's own roommate—Arie Hasif—was the first non-founder who signed up, and moved back to Israel not long after graduating from Harvard. Meanwhile, Eduardo Severin, the third co-founder of Facebook, holds an ID number of 41, placing him well behind most of the remaining founding body.
It's unusual to consider, amid the millions of Facebook members out there—a membership roster sufficiently large to make it a valuable marketing resource, as indicated by the recent move between Facebook and SecondSync for access to Facebook's television data—that there were a start to the whole affair. Moreover, it's especially interesting that three whole accounts were never used for anything beyond testing purposes. It's likely these accounts are closely protected, as if the particularly malicious got hands on one, well, it could be potentially unpleasant to see that testing account up, running, and throwing spam into the feed.
As Facebook grows from curiosity to social media titan to masterwork of marketing, there's quite a bit of history that's less than considered. The astute may well take lessons from such history, for use elsewhere. But even if it's little more than a curiosity, it still makes for great fodder in considering the history of a still-growing brand.
Edited by Cassandra Tucker
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