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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Big Day For Facebook: New Pages, Memories, And Downtime

Facebook’s having a pretty interesting day. This morning the site pushed out a nifty new registration widget for third party sites. In the last few hours it’s also pushed out a revamped version of its Pages, which brings the UI more in line with its updated profiles design, which launched earlier this month. And there are multiple reports on Twitter about a new “Memories” feature that lets you scan through your entire history on the site.
Unfortunately, you can’t see any of these right now, because Facebook — and the myriad Like buttons scattered across the web — are all down hard. Update: It’s back up for me as of 1:45 PM PST.
Given its massive distribution and the fact that it services as the primary login system for many sites, any downtime for Facebook is a big deal. We’ll update once the site comes back up — looks like it’s been down for around 15 minutes so far. For the time being though, let’s recap the features that Facebook rolled out (apparently a bit too quickly).
The new Facebook Pages look a lot like Facebook Place pages and the updated user profiles. Application tabs have been moved from a nav bar resting on top of the Wall to the left side-bar, just beneath the Page’s main image. Pages can also now feature lists of Facebook users, the same way you can feature your friends on your Facebook profile. There’s also a new button that lets page administrator ‘Login as Page’, which lets you receive notifications for just your page, and not your personal account.
Facebook Memories is still a bit mysterious because it was only showing up for a few minutes at a time, according to numerous tweets on the feature. The Next Web nabbed a shot of the navigation bar for Memories (seen below) but it doesn’t do much to show what the feature actually looks like.

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