I'm sure some of you have seen this viral Facebook post going around. How it works is you enter your birth year into the comments like @[1988:] and it will give you a name. I am stumped trying to figure out how they are able to change the users comment programmatically. The Facebook API doesn't really provide any documentation on how this is done and the thing I don't understand is how its able to work without any of the users permissions? Is this even an app or some Facebook easter egg? Any ideas?
They're not doing anything and this isn't API usage either; that's Facebook's standard method for tagging in plain text posts - @[4:] for example will show Mark ZUckerberg's profile pic - it also works in chat
It works with 'birth years' because the first few hundred user IDs are mostly in use, because when Facebook first launched it incremented new uids from 4 upwards.