

Face.com acquired by Facebook - alexcoomans
http://face.com/blog/facebook-acquires-face-com/

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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.

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

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latj
I agree with you. But I think the majority of fb users would disagree.

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chrischen
Why do you say that? It seems like a generally unwanted feature. At most I'd
think most fb users won't notice or care.

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coopdog
If it's true, a notification would have been nice. Or changing the setting
back only for people who haven't specifically looked at and increased their
privacy settings in the past

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loceng
But then they'd be directly acknowledging the abuse, and then you could
quickly change it back - however they want pictures to be tagged of you and to
become public so they can be shared to everyone who they think will engage /
comment on them, etc..

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

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

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polyfractal
Well, FaceBook _is_ trying to develop a FB phone...so the FaceNook isn't as
crazy as it may sound.

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UTHorsey
Pretty sure this is how Skynet got started.

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

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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

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

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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.

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vecinu
Monumental or invasive? I personally fear for the latter.

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tlrobinson
Given the reactions to Facebook's past privacy debacles I would be surprised
if they didn't allow people to opt out.

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skore
The problem is this: What if I don't have an account, but somebody still
happens to tag my face with my name, for whatever reason?

I know that this is mostly about facebook users, but seeing how much facebook
spam I get trying to incite me to join in, I could totally see them go this
route - Encourage people to tag friends who aren't on facebook and thus give
those friends no other choice but to claim their identity.

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tlrobinson
I'm only talking about faces tagged with an actual Facebook account.

It's unlikely they would enable facial recognition for non-Facebook users. How
will they know the difference between two different people tagged as "John
Doe" if they're not linked to a specific account?

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sp332
By their faces! Also gender, location, preferences, web pages visited (they
still track your browser even if you don't have a profile), and by the
networks of people who talk about them.

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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.

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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...

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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.

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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)

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toemetoch
Could it be that the license to process the volume facebook has in mind is
near or higher than the price of the company? I don't know the price model for
the face API but it's not unreasonable to consider a tipping point.

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beagle3
Probably not. It's so far been a symbiotic relation - face.com needed facebook
as much as facebook needed face.com.

Facebook is probably making sure that this symbiotic relation is not going to
be threatened by a competitor buying face.com

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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?

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panabee
yup, this is my guess. it's all about understanding users more deeply.
hypertargeted ads. what's in a photo these days? location + time. along with
captions and photo titles, FB can infer what you were doing, where you were
doing it, and when. but many photos go untagged because it's a pain to tag
everyone. face.com solves this problem, connecting a person to all the
valuable ad data in each photo.

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

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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).

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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.

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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...

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grandpoobah
facebook still considered a startup?

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starship
I meant the company that was bought. "face.com"

I wasn't saying facebook just bought it for the domain name. I was saying
face.com, as a startup, at some point bought that the domain name "face.com"
despite having little to no revenue.

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alttab
Let the Facebook acquisition-as-innovation begin!

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rhizome
"Acquivation?"

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sp332
Innoquisition?

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rhizome
It's a tough combo for sure.

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ma2xd
Yet another reason to not use Facebook.

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

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MiguelHudnandez
This could revolutionize the Facebook signup process. Instead of entering all
that pesky personal information, just snap a pic with your webcam. They
already know all that info!

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gaius
You joke, but the early signup process for Google App Engine was just your
Gmail password, then they told you if you were accepted into the beta
programme or not. They already read all your mail, they know if they wanted
you in or not...

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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.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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van_gogh
They'd better need some gTLDs like .face or even .palm (unfortunately .book
already has 9 pretenders).

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arrowgunz
Looks more like Facebook bought the company for the domain name. What's next?
book.com?

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newobj
Interesting. I didn't realize they were based out of Tel Aviv.

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timaelliott
Get ready, <http://book.com>, you're next!

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DigitalSea
Just waiting for Facebook to announce their purchase of skynet.com now and
then Facebook should have the market well and truly cornered.

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sokrates
Probably just for the domain.

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vecinu
This is incorrect. Read the entire post and realize that Facebook has been
using Face.com's tech for facial tagging already.

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philwelch
Though honestly, the domain is valuable too. Lots of people probably type in
"face" expecting it to autocomplete, and it doesn't always.

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tesseract
Sure, but anyone who does that is already a Facebook user.

