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Show HN: Early Adopter cred from your Twitter & Facebook IDs (earlynerd.info)

12 points by feldmanr ↗ HN
Your Early Nerd Score is a measure of how much of an early adopter you are. Low user-ids have always been a key piece of geek cred. Your score is just your percentile for each service, note that it may change over time as our data set grows.

Who made Early Nerd This is a quick hack by pkamali (@peeter on Twitter) and feldmanr (@ronfeldman on Twitter).

33 comments

[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 83.5 ms ] thread
handler
ooh nice, never seen anyone do something clever using that information before.

o/\o

feldmanr
@handler Thanks. We hacked this together pretty quickly and were surprised that nobody had done something like this simply using User IDs. We think it's pretty fun.
svmegatron
"Just kidding, Grandpa!" Ha ha ha! Get off my lawn.
feldmanr
Who would have thought? No Oauth for Aol....
feldmanr
Would love feedback on what people think, features to add, etc. Link is at http://earlynerd.info
rhc2104
Facebook's user id system is not linear (although it used to be so on a per-school basis)

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-history-of-Facebooks-user-I...

feldmanr
Interesting. We had some idea it wasn't totally linear but thought that the numbers (particularly for those that joined after college) had some validity. Do you have any thoughts on how to come up with a better algorithm given Facebook's ID system?
LogicX
How about Slashdot?
feldmanr
Do they have an API or some way to get the User ID?
technifreak
Why does the score change?
dvanduzer
It appears that the percentages for each site are counted based on the user IDs submitted/gathered, not based on any inference to maximum user ID.
dvanduzer
AOL in this list would make a lot more sense if it could track how long it's been since you deleted your account.
feldmanr
Did you try clicking it? you might be surprised.
dvanduzer
Hahaha, zinged.

edit: The elusive three digit earlynerd.info userid.

mpgoetz
What no ICQ early adopter cred? In all seriousness, I'm surprised at some of the people that are ahead of me on my list. I have a friend that is in the 5 digit range for Twitter IDs.....
feldmanr
I actually wanted to include ICQ! I had an early ID there, although can't find it anymore. Stopped signing in, was just full of SPAM...
chops
My ICQ account was hijacked years ago by a Russian. Whoever you are, 996541, I'm going to find you.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
lowglow
I remember reading a quote that facebook IDs don't even come in any particular order now. So how does this determine if I'm an early adopter of fb?
feldmanr
There's a comment string below discussing that very point. While not completely linear, there's definitely a somewhat linear path for the IDs, although it's distorted by who was in college when Facebook was college-only. Feel free to join in below with ideas of how to better parse the Facebook IDs.
synnik
Could you set it up so we can input our own Facebook ID instead of having to grant your app access?

I personally have the entire app platform disabled on my account, and do not intend to turn it back on.

jc4p
On that note, why does the Facebook connection ask to access data at anytime and to post on my wall? It seems like all you'd be interested in would be my id and friends ids, which are both public once you have my id.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
[dead] feldmanr
Fair question. The data at anytime is to keep your friends list up to date. The post on your wall is now required to offer the Facebook share button (bogus IMHO). However, you can remove both of those permissions in Facebook>Account Settings>Apps>Early Nerd.
pkamali
Thanks for the feedback. The only reason it's used, so we can refresh your connections and thus your score if someone else comes back to your page. Maybe not a critical feature...
feldmanr
I hear you. Would be tough to maintain "objective" results that way, but can put it in the list of possibile features to add. Note that we don't ask for a lot of permissions at all, the minimum necessary to get your ID. We also let you disconnect with one click in your account section. We absolutely hate shady app access and did everything possible to tread lightly, only purpose was to show you the data and make something fun.
jey 

  Authorize Early Nerd to use your account?

  This application will be able to:
    Read Tweets from your timeline.
    See who you follow, and follow new people.
    Update your profile.
    Post Tweets for you.
No thanks.
pkamali
Thanks for letting us know this is an issue. We wish the permission settings were more granular in the Twitter API, so we could turn most of this off..
ryan_s
AFAIK that's all pretty standard stuff. What are you afraid of?
zeratul
Good exercise.

Note to self: they got the data; they didn't add much value; they presented the data with fairly clean design; it could be argued that this is a data mining web app but there is a flaw if the plan is to produce income by engaging the user.

Note to feldmanr: http://www.programmableweb.com/ says that there is 4535 APIs. It's not even possible to read the documentation for a subset of them to figure out whether you can get an incremental user ID or not. But even if you did and even if you used some of them you are just producing a fun fact. Hardly a reason to come back for more. Yet, the exercise is a worth while; one gains knowledge about heterogeneous nature of web APIs - a skill necessary to build profitable data mining web apps. Please, do come back with an idea that can clearly retain your users beyond single visit.

feldmanr
Thanks! Our intention wasn't to build a sticky web service, but a simple hack that took a few days. We thought it was interesting data to see about ourselves and thought we'd share it with the community. Might it turn into something more? Perhaps, but this is just a simple proof of concept. We know (and like) Programmable Web, but as you said, no simple way to filter about user ID info.

We enjoy simple hacks that people produce that give me a few minutes of fun or some interesting piece of info. We try not to take ourselves too seriously all the time.

garethsprice
Fun! Especially like the chart showing who of my friends are the earliest adopters - that's a really interesting metric, it wasn't who I thought it would be either.

Nice work.

Edit: How about hitting Google's Usenet archives to find out who the real early adopters are? (search via e-mail address)

aphistic
Where's my geek cred from my Steam Id?!