Face.com acquired by Facebook

[polynomial]

This marks the beginning of a new era of facial recognition in social media, which is essentially a labour saving innovation so that you won't have to spend all that time tagging your facebook photos.

Instead, you'll spend all that time untagging them.

[loceng]

I recently discovered that Facebook had decided to remove my 'must approve when I am tagged' - nothing incriminating, just reminders of their abuse.

[RyanMcGreal]

Watch out, Book.com - you're next.

[amitparikh]

hah, of course Book.com is owned by B&N. Can't wait for a FaceNook tablet.

[dan_yall]

They're also considering acquisitions of f.com, k.com and aceboo.com.

[jameswyse]

From the title I thought they were just after the domain name! Seems they have picked up some pretty cool face recognising kit.

[maayank]

In a local geeks gathering a few months ago with Yossi Vardi and some Facebook executive[1], Yossi asked the executive "Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Redhat, Motorola, IBM, Yahoo, Intel, Philips, [.. more international tech companies ...], which one is the exception?", alluding to all of those companies excluding Facebook having R&D in Israel. As a local, happy to see them joining the list.

[1] Actually David Fischer, son of Bank of Israel governor Stanley Fischer

[pork]

Facebook doesn't have R&D anywhere, not even in the US

[Mystalic]

I suspect Facebook has bigger plans for Face.com's technology than auto-tagging. I bet they integrate facial recognition technology into the Facebook Platform.

Tagging every face... everywhere... and sending that data back to Facebook. That could be monumental.

[swalsh]

Facebook kind of already has facial recognition. I've seen it auto tag before. I would doubt this is in an effort to increase their existing capabilities (which seem to be pretty good already) my guess is this is more likely an anti-competitive bid.

[vecinu]

Monumental or invasive? I personally fear for the latter.

[sprobertson]

With what Face.com is capable of, they could even figure out people's emotional profiles... combine that with age estimation and they can see how that profile changes over time. I wonder when Facebook will start offering therapeutic services.

[timdorr]

Facebook already does facial recognition. It's part of the upload flow for photos.

[necolas]

I've been wondering if Facebook will do general object and/or product detection in photos to help them match highly targeted adverts to the content (and location, season, etc.) of a photo.

[evilbit]

facebook really seems to be intent on becoming the world's largest photo-sharing site.

the question is: are they planning to transform that from "omg check out these crazy party pics" into "everything is photographed and we've identified everyone involved" variety?

it seems to me that the implications of this line of progress are incomprehensibly far-reaching...

[vecinu]

I remember Facebook recently implemented their controversial Face detecting module. Privacy advocates were freaked out because Facebook was trying to automatically tag people in photos simply based on face recognition.

I assume they're going to be moving forward in that regard by acquiring Face.com's tech.

[beagle3]

Facebook have been using face.com for face detection and recognition for a while. I guess they were happy enough with the results that they wanted control of the technology (and/or to stop others from using it)

[Vitaly]

Shameless plug here: http://search.labs.face.com - a site we developed for face.com lets you scan for faces all your Facebook photos and do some interesting searches on them, like "smiling child, female with glasses" etc.

[loceng]

So I'm guessing the whole face.com acquisition was to increase awareness of context of photos?

[radagaisus]

Facebook already used the Face.com API extensively. Rumors about this circulated here (Israel) this past month. This is great news.

[treelovinhippie]

$80-100m is far far too cheap. I think face.com made a poor decision here. Facebook will now be able to develop a system that will be able to recognize faces in any future or past photos (obviously including the 100s of billions they already have) and to link that face to a name and a bunch of demographic data. 3-5 years down the line, this ability will be incredibly powerful (think Minority Report, HUD overlays etc).

[benatkin]

This is more vague than "support our service":

> We love you guys, and the plan is to continue to support our developer community. If there are new developments you can expect to hear from us here, on the developer blog, and through our developer newsletter.

I think the vague wording is probably intentional. It doesn't seem like the sort of service that facebook would be into providing directly to developers.

[starship]

face.com -- all I can think of when I see this is "how much did they pay for that domain name???"

It must have been in the 10's of thousands of dollars. How that can be a good use of startup resources is a complete mystery to me...

[grandpoobah]

facebook still considered a startup?

[alttab]

Let the Facebook acquisition-as-innovation begin!

[rhizome]

"Acquivation?"

[ma2xd]

Yet another reason to not use Facebook.

[gaving]

Yeah. Can't wait for my facebook using mates to make my shadow profile more accurate.

[jps359]

wait why?

[mkramlich]

"Drop the book. Just Face. It's cleaner."

But seriously, facial recognition is a useful feature to save folks time trying to tag people with names in every photo. Also helps with discovering new people you want to meet. And yes of course it could be used for "evil" both by Facebook and the government. But that's true of any other technology, so arguably a wash.

[danso]

Wow, I assumed that Face.com was a part of Facebook.com...their look and feel seemed like a front-facing spinoff of FB, to get developers more interested in the technology. Their API has been very generous and useful for all sorts of projects, but I'm sure this is going to freak privacy advocates even more...frankly, the connections/derivations FB could make with face recognition will not be any more comprehensive than what they can already do with the interaction data they already have.

[CaveTech]

Facebook has already been using facial recognition for some time. If anything it will just increase the success rate of their current approach.

[antidoh]

An interesting phenomenon may come when unintentional photo bombs identify either celebrities or wanted criminals.

[nhebb]

So the next hot facebook app will be a photo tool to make your face unrecognizable by facial recognition software.

[known]

"Business owners and investors use systems, rather than their time, to generate income." --Robert Kiyosaki