Face Recognition App for Facebook – Photo Finder by Face.com

Asma Rafi

16 years ago

One of my colleagues (among the first ones to know about my recent blogging activities) sent me Apple’s iPhotos link and said that the faces section of iPhotos can be very easily linked to my Internetnal Theory.If that is possible to scan photos in your hard drive and tag them toidentify you and your friends, it wouldn’t be surprising to run asimilar software on social networking sites/photo logs/google imagesetc. to tag anyone, anywhere, anytime…

Of course you’d need at least one pictureof who you are looking (tagging) for; e.g. take a random picture ofsomeone passing by the street and try to find a match on the web using Face Recognition Software; you could find the matching person and then run Google search to delve into his/her digital past …so in essence there are no random people…sounds very interesting! Thanks for the idea!

I searched for Face Recognition Technology and Softwares and…mygoodness!!! There are tons already available. Gone are the days whenFace Recognition Technology was only meant to be used to identify andfind criminals, but now it’s everywhere. Almost any software developedwith a concept of storing pictures and creating albums is now equippedwith face tagging and recognizing ability. Picasa by Google for example, launched face recognition technology in September 2008. Apple followed the tracks in January 2009 with the launch of iLife ‘09 (includes iPhoto ’09 with face recognition capabilities) and now just recently Flickr is flickering with this new feature.

All these softwares are designed to run on your personaldatabases/albums and the results … well, I don’t know and I don’t wantto debate who the winner is or who outperforms photo tagging in itsentirety rather my intent here is to explore possibilities of how farthis face recognition technology can go and how the hype and extensityof this developing (or already developed) technology would impact oursocial and societal interdependency and attitudes.

Hence the exploration began and I came across the alpha version of Photo Finderby Face.com, a Facebook appexclusively to tag faces on Facebook! How does that sound? It’s notjust limited to your own photo collection rather you can scan photos ofyour friends and your friends’ friends to find and tag not justyourself and your friends but also “faces on the wild”(yes, that someone on the street, I just talked about in the beginningof this post) in your ever-growing, wider network. Just imagine theextensibility and scalability of Photo Finder to scan all one billionphotos uploaded in Facebook every single month! The statistics so farare amazing and I guess we’ll have to wait till at least the betarelease is launched.

So dear Facebook faces! Are you all ready to be tagged?

By the way, Invitation for Alpha Testing for photo finder is, i guess, still on.