I needed to add my Facebook user id to my WarriorForum profile. Should be simple, right? Well 40 minutes later I stumbled on the solution.

The problem is that I have a people friendly “vanity” URL for my Facebook profile, and this hides the user ID that would normally appear in your Facebook URL.

After Googling for an answer and initially getting nowhere (most of these answers were written before the Facebook timeline update), I found a post that said I should install and App called “What’s my Facebook ID”. So I did. But it insists on you liking some kind of advert before you can see the result.

Good marketing, but I hated it.

I want just a tiny snippet of information that, frankly, Facebook itself should tell you. So, I backed out of that crappy app, deleted it, and looked for another way.

The clue came when I read a post that said that Facebook  Apps still require a numeric ID to do their job. Ah ha.

I went to my profile settings, went to the “apps” tab. I hovered over the name of one of the apps in my collection and there it is, showing up as “user_id” in by browser status bar (the part of the screen that displays the target URL when you hover over a link:

I hope you find this helpful.