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Facebook Goes To 64 Bit User IDs

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the internet-users-on-mars-or-europa-can-expect-to-sign-up-soon dept.

NewsCloud writes "Facebook has announced to developers that they are moving to a 64 bit user ID in November. At 32 bits, the current ID allows nearly 4.3 billion user accounts. Yet, despite having only 47 million users today, Facebook's move to 64 bits will allow it to have more than 18 quintillion (18,446,744,074,000,000,000) user accounts. Of course, there are currently only about 6.5 billion people in the world. Is Facebook setting their sights beyond Earth or just trying to avoid what happened when Slashdot ran out of space for comment IDs last year. Perhaps they are planning to implement personas."

10 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. Reminds me of a Facebook group by langelgjm · · Score: 5, Funny

    Reminds me of a Facebook group: "If this group reaches 4,294,967,296 it might cause an integer overflow."

    --
    "Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
  2. Facebook loners rejoice! by Bruce+McBruce · · Score: 5, Funny

    You can be your own 5000 best friends.

    1. Re:Facebook loners rejoice! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      You're assuming I can stand myself...

  3. thank god by friedman101 · · Score: 5, Funny

    finally I can register my bacteria colony!!

    staphylococcus aureus #19392133943904 is in a relationship with staphylococcus caprae #93939394839483934

    1. Re:thank god by Firehed · · Score: 5, Funny

      What the hell? That's my S. caprae, the dirty slut!

      --
      How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
    2. Re:thank god by Dr.+Photo · · Score: 4, Funny

      Can germs get V.D.?

  4. Two-Faced by Nom+du+Keyboard · · Score: 5, Funny

    Clearly this is meant to accommodate two-faced people, people of multi-faced discrimination, and Hexadecimal.

    --
    "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
  5. Re:News? by Joe+U · · Score: 5, Funny

    HTML, not [i][b]BBCode[/b][/i]. OK?

  6. In other news... by suv4x4 · · Score: 4, Funny

    I just changed the type of column "content" on my blog from "text" to "mediumtext". I'm ready to give a press conference as to the reason behind my decision to all interested.

  7. Re:Spammers by dricci · · Score: 4, Funny

    I think you're confusing Facebook with MySpace, which doesn't have this problem as they appear to still use a flat-file database updated in notepad.