Facebook

See also Wikipedia's article about "Facebook".

Facebook, originally founded as The Facebook, is essentially 'procrastination central'. The site was started by a Harvard student, just for us Ivy League brats. Sadly, it's now been opened up to any and every member of the unwashed hoi polloi.

Facebook launched at Harvard on February 4th, 2004. Columbia was added to the list of schools on February 25th, followed by:

• Stanford on February 26th
• Yale on March 1st
• Dartmouth and Cornell on March 7th
• the great unwashed masses

Columbians initially resisted the Harvard Friendster clone, with a vocal group preferring the more interactive CUCommunity. In fact, the spring of 2004 bore witness to the CUCommunity-Facebook War. However, following the massive influx of the Class of 2008 onto Facebook as soon as they got their UNIs, resistance collapsed and Columbia meekly assimilated into the Crimson beast. Subsequently, Facebook survived challenges from a number of competing sites, including CUCommunity's successor, CampusNetwork.

Facebook tricks (or "creepy stalker techniques")

See albums you're not supposed to

If you can see one picture in an album (for example, if someone whose photos you can view is in it), you can trick Facebook into letting you see the whole album

1. Go to the one picture in the album you can see.
2. The URL will be of the form

   http://columbia.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=012345678&op=1&view=all&subj=123456&id=1234567

3. Erase everything beyond the ? except for pid=xxxxxxxx an ampersand "&" and id=xxxxxxx so that the URL is of the form

   http://columbia.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=012345678&id=1234567

   though of course 012345678 and 1234567 are just sample numbers. Leave whatever's originally there. Don't forget to leave the ampersand!
4. Go to that URL and you'll be able to (slowly) see every picture in the album by clicking the Next and Previous buttons

See larger profile pictures of non-friends

If you can see someone's reduced sized profile picture, you can see a larger version by doing the following:

1. Go to the URL of the small image (in Firefox, right click the image and hit "View Image". In IE right click the image and hit "Properties" and then copy the URL into the address bar and go to the page)
2. The URL will have the form of

   http://profile.ak.facebook.com/profile5/1234/56/s789012_3456.jpg

3. Change the s (small) in the URL to an n (normal)
4. The URL should now have the form

   http://profile.ak.facebook.com/profile5/1234/56/n789012_3456.jpg

5. Go to the URL and voila, a slightly larger profile picture appears!

External links

• Facebook website