There's a strange bug on Facebook where if you post @[xxx:0] in a comment (with the XXX being three random numbers), when you hit enter a random name will appear. For example: @[345:0] = Karina Scalise. Weeeeiiiiirrrrrd!


It's currently being passed around Facebook as a "enter in the last three digits of your phone number and Facebook will tell you your phone's name!" kinda thing, which is, y'know, dumb. My friend Aaron who tipped me on this thinks it's more likely database coordinates of user accounts or Facebook employees. I did a little more tinkering with it and seems that the final 0 can be any digit or letter and it still works. You can get other weird results with more messing around. One combination I tried resulted in "Nokia." Figure that one out.

As far as I can tell it's entirely useless, but what does it all mean!? Are these the secret coordinates to a North Korean sub? The recipe for Coca-Cola? The cheat-code for unlimited lives... in life? Geeks and conspiracy theorists, please go nuts in the comments. In the meantime, I've gotta go explain to my girlfriend why I'm posting other women's names in comments.


Thanks to Aaron Joseph for the tip!

UPDATE: Giz alum Rosa Golijan broke it down for us in the comments:

This isn't a bug. The number string corresponds to the ID number of a Facebook page or profile. Sticking it between brackets — which are preceded by an "@" symbol — tells Facebook to convert the number to its corresponding text (be it a user name or a page title). The "0" — or other number — after the colon is there to prevent the converted text from turning into a link to the corresponding page or profile (as a tag normally does). You can use this trick with longer number strings as well. For example, @[5021234:0] will convert to my name, as "5021234" corresponds to my profile. (You can confirm this by going to facebook.com/5021234.) Or alternatively you can enter something like @[322080934472296:0] and it'll convert to the text "Don't Panic! This is just a test." (Which corresponds to the title of a Facebook page I made...which happens to have that particular ID number.)

So there ya go.