Its not "Visualizing". Its called fetching random images.
That was my reaction, too. I was expecting something more than a random pixel map.
also, it's slow as shit when you drill down to a subselection of 'faces'
The Faces of Facebook – Visualizing 1.2 billion Facebook profile images
41–49 of 49 posts
Re: The Faces of Facebook – Visualizing 1.2 billion Facebook profile images
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your browser is doing the downloading. The URLs are available from the API (I changed random characters): $ curl -I https://graph.facebook.com/100000624321700/picture HTTP/1.1 302 Found (...) Location: https://fbcdn-profile-a.akamaihd.net/hprofile-ak-prn1/573867_100000621711234_930571234_q.jpg Then it is just a matter of incrementing the number. This might be a fun research project.
No rate limits?
After zooming in to 2 different areas and dragging it around for a bit, I now don't get images and I just get a popup asking me to log in to Facebook whenever I try zoom in anywhere.
Re: The Faces of Facebook – Visualizing 1.2 billion Facebook profile images
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
No rate limits?
After zooming in to 2 different areas and dragging it around for a bit, I now don't get images and I just get a popup asking me to log in to Facebook whenever I try zoom in anywhere.
Definitely rate limits. They should probably be proxying the requests and caching the images.
Re: The Faces of Facebook – Visualizing 1.2 billion Facebook profile images
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's even a https://www.facebook.com/NaN :)
Also: https://www.facebook.com/window.location.href
For some reason https://www.facebook.com/undefined is different from a regular 404 like https://www.facebook.com/null
Re: The Faces of Facebook – Visualizing 1.2 billion Facebook profile images
#45Interestingly, the first 14 "members," or at least images, are male. I'm not immediately familiar with the early development team of Facebook, but it appears that they didn't start sharing with their female friends immediately.
or maybe they did but their friends were not interested.
Re: The Faces of Facebook – Visualizing 1.2 billion Facebook profile images
#46I was quite surprised by the [edit: relatively] prodigious amount of penises.
Most of those were people who just look like penises.
Re: The Faces of Facebook – Visualizing 1.2 billion Facebook profile images
#47Idle curiosity for the mathfolk, by clicking somewhere at random what's the chances of getting your own picture to load?
Re: The Faces of Facebook – Visualizing 1.2 billion Facebook profile images
#48I'm not sure what I'm looking at here... all I see is a giant zoomable grid of chromatic noise. Is it supposed to be showing peoples pictures or something?
A facebook profile picture of smallest dimension (50px X 50px) will have minimum size of 3 kb.. So, if this site will show real profile pics all together, it'll have to load almost 3.5 TB of data for 1.2 billion pictures.. A connection with 100Kb/s downloading speed will take around 430 days, and a connection with 1MB/s will take around 42 days.. I don't think anyone would be interested to spend more than 2 minutes o…
And on day 41 the browser crashes. Oh well.