The Faces of Facebook
1.2 billion of Facebook profile pictures collected in a single web page.
Playing around with Facebook API, I found a bug that allowed me to access the profile pictures of all Facebook users, so I put them together in a simple interface and published it.
It became a worldwide sensation receiving 7M+ visits from all continents, broadcasted on TV programs, emitted on radio stations, published in printed newspapers and posted on more than 6,000 websites.
It was pretty overwhelming being interviewed all of a sudden by BBC India, LBC Lebanon and Middle East International TV, TN Argentina, German Radio Station MDR JUMP, Blu Radio Colombia, Radio Metro Argentina, El Pais Cali Newspaper, Semana Magazine, 20 minutes France, Spain, Switzerland and Mexico, AdvertisingAge, Creativity Online, CNET, Yahoo News, Google News, The Huffington Post Japan, MSN News, Wired, Mashable, The Verge, Gizmodo, BBC, CNN Tech, CNN Latino, DesignTaxi, and so on.
The homepage is a canvas of pixels that shows all the faces zoomed-out, organized in chronological order, from Mark Zuckerberg onward. Users can click on any pixel of the screen to zoom-in and get a 100x100px picture of that pixel and its surroundings, drag to navigate in any direction, and scroll down to zoom-out.
According to Facebook’s Legal Department, I shouldn't affirm that the order is chronological.
In zoom-in mode, users can click on any face to check that person's profile.
Sorry Mr. Sarode, it was a random pick and I hope you don’t mind.
Through the Pin button users optionally sign in via Facebook to pinpoint their picture on the page and see where they show up in relation to their friends.
I received thousands of emails. Most of them media requests, many congratulating, some weird ones, several job offers, paid project proposals, and few threatening.
I want to share these two.
Jan from Germany: just 1 word.
"Someday I would like to be like you". From Enzo, an Argentinian kid.
In the meantime, the project was all over the news, the website was inaccessible to thousands of visitors due to 2 annoying issues.
When the website reached 24K+ visits per second, the server collapsed for the 4th time in less than 5 days.
Hackers didn’t stop trying to hack the website. That is why I closed the project and stopped aggregating new profiles to the collage.
I learnt so many things from this project. Like this one: my name in Russian is Натали Рохас.
Type: Personal Project
Tasks: Creative Director + Designer + Front-end developer + Back-end developer
Technologies: HTML5 (canvas tag), Javascript, CSS, jQuery, EaselJS, Ajax, FB API, PHP and MySQL
Years: 2012, 2013