Connecting Facebook’s Dots

We’re on to you Facebook. Sorry there is just too much going on here for it all to be a coincidence: First cult hoodiegate, then Facesquare, then the Vadar-inspired Facebook Friends icon and now this subliminal Zuckerberg-ian slip in plain sight on the Facebook homepage. Connecting Facebook’s Dots
Hmmm “Connect and share”… so that’s what the kids are calling it these days.

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Facebook Uses Face Recognition To Help Tag Photos

It’s no secret that Facebook’s Photo product is the most popular photo sharing service on the web by a huge margin. And one of the key features that made it so popular has been tagging, which lets you associate your friends with the photos they’re in — Facebook says that 100 million photo tags are added every day. Which is all the more amazing given that tagging is kind of a pain. Fortunately it’s getting better.
Back in October Facebook launched a feature that had some face detection built in — if someone appeared in multiple photos in the same album, Facebook would group them together and ask you who that person was, allowing you to tag them in one fell swoop. Now it’s improving on that by using face recognition technology to guess who the person is, using your network of friends as a reference.
Of course, any time the words “Face recognition” and Facebook are put together, there are going to be questions about privacy. Facebook VP Product Chris Cox says that the new feature complies with all relevant laws, and that users are given a choice of opting out of it entirely (i.e. your name won’t be suggested in the ‘tag your friends’ dialog, though your friends can still add it manually).
He also says that the technology couldn’t currently be used for any kind of site-wide face search, because it’s reliant on your social graph. Because you’ve got a fairly small number of friends, and typically appear in photos alongside an even smaller number of those, Facebook doesn’t need to be super accurate when it’s matching faces. Cox guesses that most people won’t even notice that the feature is active, though there will be an announcement at the top of the tagging screen.
The new face recognition technology will be rolling out to 5% of users next week, and will ramp up gradually after that. It’s also worth noting that Facebook licensed some of the technology it used to build this (it wouldn’t say from whom), and built some of it in-house.

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Wildfire Launches A ‘Compete.com’ For Twitter And Facebook Accounts

For many years, the tech industry has gauged the success of websites by tracking usage stats like the number of unique visitors and page views the site receives each month. Wildfire, a service that helps companies run contests and social media campaigns via Twitter, Facebook, and email, is launching a new tool that looks to do the same for social media presences — in other words, it lets you visualize who has the most Twitter and Facebook followers, and how quickly they’ve grown over time. You can access the new monitor at http://monitor.wildfireapp.com.
The tool is pretty straightforward: enter the Twitter or Facebook accounts that you want to compare, and the site will plot out the total number of follower/fans they have. If you don’t want to bother finding the appropriate links to each profile, you can just enter the name of the company, and the tool will associate it with the proper social media accounts automatically (enter ‘Wal-Mart’, and it will show you Wal-Mart’s Twitter and Facebook accounts).
Media Monitor will add a little context to the data by showing the percentage change over recent time periods, and you can overlay multiple company profiles onto the same graph.
It’s a neat tool, but Wildfire isn’t the first service to offer these kind of analytics. TwitterCounter lets you easily visualize a user’s growth over time, and AllFacebook’s Pages tool does something similar for Facebook fans.
Disclosure: We recently used Wildfire to run a sweepstakes for the Cr-48.

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