Facebook's QR Cap

Sometime back we wrote a post about usage of QR code in social media. Seems like Facebook' Co-Founder and Chief Executing Officer Mark Zuckerburg agrees to the concept as well; in fact Zuckerburg and Co. have gone a step or two ahead. At least that's what looks like when you look the Facebook headquarters from the sky.
A 42ft QR code that is visible from even the space occupies one of the building block. The word is that a group of employees took to the roof, tar painted the area and now the 42ft QR which when scanned takes you too the FB QR Code page. And rather than provide you with a link to the FB age we thought of putting up a small QR code for you here. Nothing related to the BIG QR on the Facebook roof ;)

Scan this code to see the Facebook page which already has over 4k likes to it. And it seems the page will be holding a few contest type of interactions in the coming days or weeks. Currently the page has a video of the employees creating the QR itself and a few other aerial images.
The QR was put as part of a Space Hackathon that was initiated by Mark. The group however was led by Mark Pike, an associate on user operations with the intellectual property team; and this is what he wrote on Facebook Engineer' blog about the whole event plan to build this QR. This is just a snippet, follow this link to read the while story. And finally we will leave you with the aerial view of the FB campus where you can see the QR nice and dark:

When the last of the employees moved in to our new Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Mark Zuckerberg announced a "Space Hackathon."  His post encouraged everybody to decorate the new space to make it our own—tag the walls with spray paint, hang cool posters, and hack the building with some patented Facebook personality. But a few of us interpreted the call to action a bit too literally. We decided that we wanted our "space hack" to actually be visible from space. We wanted to hack the globe.

It started with a comment on Zuck's post. I wrote, "Hack yeah! I'd like to paint a gigantic QR code somewhere so we can RickRoll online maps, or point people to our careers site, or send them to a 'Clarissa Explains it All' GeoCities Page." By the end of the day, that comment had nearly 50 Likes. I still wasn't sure if people were seriously interested, so I started a Group. When over 100 people joined, it was game on.

We spent the next few days planning out the logistics of how to put a QR Code on the roof of Facebook's office. Building materials were debated intensely:

"Should we build it out of wood?" Too costly. Too hard to get up on the roof. It'll rot. It'll blow away.

"How about tile?" Too heavy. Too expensive. Too difficult to paint.

"Has anybody actually been up there yet? What if we just paint directly on the roof?" Problem solved.

An engineer on the team realized that the shorter the URL stored in a QR code, the less complex the QR code needs to be. We figured that meant (a) less painting, and (b) a better chance that the code could be scanned from space. We went ahead and purchased http://fbco.de and the QR code pixels fell into place from there.

[Image Credit: Justin Shaffer and don't forget the HACK near the QR]