Secrets Behind Facebook Usernames

Do you guys remember that few years back Facebook had usernames like this as mentioned below - www.facebook.com/98247249872 Why did Facebook changed it policies and pattern to www.facebook.com/abcd Different people have different algorithms regarding it and before elaborating this let us see some of the news paper headings regarding Facebook . "130,000 Facebook passwords stolen by Anonymous " "45,000 Facebook passwords stolen by Ramnit Worm" How these passwords got stolen ? Does Anonymous have the time to Hack or to do anything with individual ids ?. No they possibly don't have time for these ! So lets understand why Facebook changed its policies and how Anonymous stole the Passwords ? Like when you register for a collage or school you are given a registration number and you can even login using those registration numbers same goes for Facebook when you register for Facebook you are given a registration number(Now it automatically gives a default username like www.facebook.com/abcd ) and you can change it later. Like every registration id and password in schools or collage goes in a Database same goes for Facebook.So Anonymous and other hackers just hacked into the registration database. Database in any company is stored systematically according to the registrations like say the results of Roll No 1-20 is stored in File 1-Results of Roll No 20-40 is stored in File no 2. As you can see its easy to browse and find the results according to Roll Numbers but What if we have the find the results according to the names ? And what if the results are of some country students ? The guess is casual there me be more identical names. That justifies the algorithm of Why Facebook changed the username policies . Another reasons for applying this username was so that people could find you easily. As you all know with one names there exists many Facebook ids so finding them gets a little difficult so knowing the username of a person makes it easy. And one of my favorite reasons that it changed was so that people could log in easily without entering there email ids. Say for example my username is Hackbook.biz So I can log in as shown in the image below

Conclusion So it is crystal clear that Facebook changed it policies because of following reasons Preventing Database Hacks based on numeric usernames. People could find a new friend easily by just asking there username . It makes login process very fast .