Branches

User IDs used to carry such weight. The lower your ID, the hipper you were to the trend, granting you all the status and power that eluded you through more traditional social interactions. I remember when ICQ was the flickr pownce twitter of the day, exploding at such a rate that people were boasting at how few digits their ID contained. I’ll admit, I’m a sucker for anything logarithmic, but even that was a little too much nerdiness for my geekiness to handle.

What I do find interesting, though, is when that kind of status is bestowed on others out of respect, or as an accident of timing. Take, for instance, the URL syntax for an actor on IMDB. Here’s the one for Philip Baker Hall:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001311/

Apparently Philip was the 1,311th actor entered into their database. Who do you think would pop up if you replaced those last four digits with ‘0001’? Take a minute to guess, then click to find the answer:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000001/

Not too big of a surprise, I guess. Dig a little deeper and you’ll see that his #1 status may only partially be due to favoritism, and partially to alphabetical priority. Number 1 through 82 (composer Victor Young) are all members of Hollywood’s elite, in alpha order. So, okay, Fred’s not necessarily their favorite, just in an 82-way tie for first. Still respectable.

How about movies? Movies on IMDB have their own ID category. Here’s the link for Hudson Hawk:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102070/

Replace those digits with 000001, and you get…

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0000001/

That’s Carmencita, a one-minute movie made in 1894. The description takes longer to read than the movie does to watch: “Performing on what looks like a small wooden stage, wearing a dress with a hoop skirt and white high-heeled pumps, Carmencita does a dance with kicks and twirls, a smile always on her face.” Okay, one of the first movies ever made. Makes sense it’d be #0000001.

So now I’m hooked, and beginning to reconsider my snotty attitude on the hyper-coolness of being #1. I couldn’t help but dig around my bookmarks and frequently visited sites, and come up with a bunch of sites that use a similar ID-based syntax for their URLs. The interestingness of the following list of number ones will vary based on your tolerance of the mundane and trivial. (Mine = off the charts.)

Board Game Geek
Entry #1 on BGG is a game I’ve never heard of called Die Macher, released in 1986. It seems plenty favored by the Board Game Geekers, with a 8.1 rating out of 10. It’s not the highest-rated game on there, but it’s pre-Settlers of Catan, so maybe it was the highest when the database was set up.

Fun meta-game for BGG-surfing: try to find the oldest game on there. The earliest date I’ve found is 200 A.D., the supposed release date of Backgammon.

Metafilter
No revelation here, since Matt links to it every July 14, but the #1 post on MeFi is a link to cat-scan.com, “one of the strangest sites [mathowie’s] ever seen.” It’s heartening to consider what passed for strange in our halcyon pre-Goatse days.

Cooking.com
If you’re setting up a cooking database and had to pick a recipe to enter first, you’d probably go with your favorite breakfast dish, too. In this case it’s Classic Omelets with Fines Herbes and Toato Concass. Being the first entry, its fame was quickly eclipsed by newer, trendier dishes, and as such it’s never gotten a single rating. Perhaps no one has access to chervil. Fear not, little dish, give me a weekend, and I’ll rescue you from the dark caverns of the unrated.

Twitter
It’s not possible to search just on twitter ID, so I couldn’t find #1. I was able to find the first tweets of Twitter founders Biz and Ev (posts #21 and #28, repsectively), both of whom sum up the early twitter gestalt perfectly, as their first messages are exactly the same: “just setting up my twttr”.

TinyURL
The URL-shrinking service TinyURL has been around since 2002, so I was a little surprised to find that the site first shortened by it was still online. Type in tinyurl.com/1, and you’ll end up at gilby.com, the “home of Gilby Productions,” a site dedicated to unicycling and the promotion thereof. Amusingly, the TinyURL address—a URL meant to be a shortcut to the final destination—is actually longer than “gilby.com”.

Bonus TinyURL nerdery
A generated TinyURL is constructed of a seemingly random assortment of numbers and letters. Which means that on occasion, the URL ID is going to spell out a word. It took me a number of tries to land on something that didn’t redirect to a 404, but I’m happy to report that if you’re ever looking for the Microsoft Exchange Server Mailbox Merge Wizard, your life just got a lot easier. All you need to remember is this: http://tinyurl.com/poop.