Facebook's funny redirect behavior

gistfile1.txt

# Curling some Facebook users' IDs at http://fb.me will send you to their profile
$ curl fb.me/6 -D -
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Location: http://www.facebook.com/6
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
X-FB-Server: 10.52.92.83
X-Cnection: close
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2011 23:38:26 GMT
Content-Length: 0

# Others don't for some reason
$ curl fb.me/204381 -D -
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Location: http://www.facebook.com
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
X-FB-Server: 10.52.68.61
X-Cnection: close
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2011 23:37:33 GMT
Content-Length: 0

# Something invalid like 0 sends you home too
$ curl fb.me/0 -D -
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Location: http://www.facebook.com
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
X-FB-Server: 10.54.71.24
X-Cnection: close
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2011 23:36:33 GMT
Content-Length: 0

# But apparently ID 1 is Yahoo!
$ curl fb.me/1 -D -
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://www.yahoo.com
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
X-FB-Server: 10.52.59.69
X-Cnection: close
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2011 23:35:54 GMT
Content-Length: 0

Last one is probably left over from when they were testing out the url shortener feature of the domain..

GD-iMac:~ george$ curl fb.me/Dl9CyHL1 -D -
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2tG1v0lSLQ
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
X-FB-Server: 10.54.82.42
X-Cnection: close
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2011 23:52:27 GMT
Content-Length: 0

Aha, never realized they wanted a general tool out of it. How'd you find that particular ID?

Facebook automatically shortens urls for some things. Text message notifications are one example iirc.