They mentioned something in a hiring post about someone having a low user id, then someone created this using that post as inspiration.

What's the point?

(I'm the author of it)

If you mean the point of writing it, I saw a couple of people tweeting about how to find it out by searching the source of https://github.com/account whilst logged in and wondered if I could automate it. A chance to flex my HTML/JS muscles for fun if you will.

Tweeted it as a laugh and went to bed. It's had quite a nice trip through the internets since. As someone mentions elsewhere in the comments, it's interesting to compare when people signed up and their id to see how the GitHub user base has grown.

So yeah, no real point except idle curiosity and a small challenge for myself to implement it.

Determining who was there first, maybe?

That was my though. Kind of like on Slashdot how people used to like their 4 digit user id's

mojombo is #1 :-) Then defunkt, then pjhyett.

Not too sure, not even the tweet button gives a reason: "Found out I'm GitHub user 346166 by using http://caius.github.com/github_id/#PHPAdam

No idea. But crossing this with the "Member Since" date is stunning. I did a quick lookup for three accounts off the top of my head:

03/2008: ~2700

04/2008: ~8800

02/2011: ~627600

My join date states February 2008, and apparently i'm user #1212

http://caius.github.com/github_id/#bgianfo

Curiosity.