Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Goes To 64 Bit User IDs
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."
Why did they used to make part of the ID be a network identifier? What if you need to move users to other networks? I can perhaps see how it could make it possible to assign unique id's without central communication by making blocks of numbers to be pre-assigned by different regions, etc. But as a direct network allocator, it seems problematic.
And why we are on the topic of ID's, why are Microsoft product ID's so damned long? They use letters, which gives them 35-base number set (including the digits, excluding "o") which in theory would mean you don't need long strings. Is this to reduce trial-and-error loop hacking? It seems like it would make for a lot of help-desk calls because the chances of mistyping is large.
Table-ized A.I.
This has to one of the dumbest articles to reach the slashdot headlines.
So basically facebook changed there maximum users from a huge number to an even bigger number.
Are we going to post a news story everytime google adds to their storage system?
or microsoft adds another bloated line of code?
or everytime the telco's build a tower?
The other thing to remember is that there might be a certain number of people in the world at any one time, but that people are born and die within that time [and old ones won't be deleted]. I don't think it's inconceivable that Facebook might reach their current limit in 20-25 years.
Even it if it's just user IDs, and not object IDs as another user posted...
* 64-bit user IDs are easier to partition. They could be using the top N bits as a database ID.
* They may want to allocate the IDs randomly instead of sequentially. 64-bit IDs would involve fewer collisions.
* We don't know what their account churn rate is; if people sign up, forget, and create new accounts again frequently, they could have many more than 47 million dormant accounts sitting around.
A 32-bit ID really does get cramped when you have a large user base.
My interpretation (which is just as invalid as everyone else's, Facebook included) would be that they are abolishing UserIDs altogether and switching to a 64-bit universal ID. That kinda makes sense, as it would make defining relationships between any two types of object easy.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The "We may not reach 4,294,967,296 members but..." discussion thread has been breaking the sad news about 64-bit storage for several months now.
> I'm ready to give a press conference as to the reason behind my decision to all interested.
ie, "I will definitely call my mom about this."