face.com

When we released the Face Alerts feature with Photo Tagger, we thought it’ll be a cool complementary feature, and a great way to respond to user requests. Since then, over 50,000 users signed on to accept updates when new photos of themselves are uploaded to their social network, as soon as our scans find their faces. It has since been dubbed the “Google alerts of faces”.

With the release of Facebook’s new privacy settings, which according to some were a little too open, the conversation around face.com’s apps really warmed up. NBC Bay Area joined the conversation and aired a segment about face.com. ABC soon followed with their own TechBytes segment, and in total got syndicated for broadcast to 53 additional affiliates. As always the blogsphere was one step ahead keeping up with the latest developments, but soon to follow were the Radio stations. Computer America (National), KTAR-FM (Phoenix, AZ), Sirius XM (satellite), WMET-AM (DC, Internet Radio), and WKLS-FM (Atlanta, GA), invited us to both talk about face.com’s new Face Alerts feature, explain how it monitors your online image, and take a shot at educating the masses on do’s and don’ts in today’s social networks, where everyone is a reality-show star, and every friend is a paparazzi…

Thanks for all your support so far – and keep sending us your feedbacks to feedback@face.com!

With over 30,000 alpha testers, 100’s of feedback emails (and the same amount of bug fixes), Photo Tagger is now open to all!

For those new to Photo Tagger, it’s simply the quickest and most fun way to tag photos on facebook. Pumped up with the best face recognition technology on the planet, Photo Tagger automatically guesses the names of people in photos, and groups together similar faces so you can tag in bulks. Go ahead and give it a go!

But the real gem with this latest release is an amazing new feature we call Face Alerts, which notifies you whenever a new photo of you appears online! Sort of like Google alerts for faces. Once you opt-in, Photo Tagger will continuously scan new albums uploaded to your social network, and send you a facebook notification, email you, or both, whenever it thinks your face was found in a photo. This way, whether you’re looking to share or hide embarrassing photos, you can be the first to take action. In addition, you can also receive notifications on your friend’s photos every few days – a whole new way of staying up to date with the latest photos of your friends.

We’d like to thank our alpha testers, reviewers, and all the great folks who provided us with valuable feedback and contributed in making this new service even better. Please keep sending us your feedback at http://face.com/feedback or directly at feedback@face.com – we’d love to hear what you think!

Tag away!

- team face.com

With Photo Tagger now two months into our invite-only testing, and after much needed improvements, we decided it’s time to power up last week’s  DEMO Fall ‘09 power users, saving them the hassle of tagging through 1000’s of photos uploaded from this great conference.

Debra Becker, Marketing Director of DEMO Conference, made this happen and had this to say:

“We at DEMO received exclusive invites from face for our conference’s attendees. These invites were handed out to the highly influential DEMO attendees, saving them time in tagging their pics from the conference and allowing them to enjoy the conference instead. ”

We’d like to thank DEMO attendees for the support and feedback. If you didn’t have the chance to try it on – try it now!

We love the ABC show “Better Off Ted”, but the last aired episode 13 Secrets and Lives just hit the spot with us facers.

“It all starts during an innocent meeting where Ted, Lem and Phil discuss a new search engine they’re developing. Instead of being text-based, it would be capable of finding pictures of someone all over the web based off their scanned image.”

You see where this is going, right…? Go watch it

What appears to be science fiction to these guys is a mere reality for our Photo Finder users, and we love to hear that sometimes you’ll find that special photo that beats even those hilarious moments on the show. Face search technology can be really funny sometimes, so let us know if you came across a photo you completely forgot about, didn’t expect, or was just too funny to pass!

Since it’s launch, we’ve been getting lots of great suggestions and bug reports. So… we’ve just pushed a new version with some cool user-suggested goodies for you to check out:

• Free-Text tagging: yes, you can now tag non-friends and non-facebook users the same way you would on facebook – just type in the name and hit <enter>. Note that free-text tags will be saved to facebook without a link to the user’s profile.
  
• Auto-Tag bookmarklet: You can now quickly launch Photo Tagger while browsing facebook albums and photos and Auto-Tag them. Just drag this button to your Bookmarks Bar!

  

  Drag this button to your Bookmarks Bar to auto-tag any album on facebook!

• Tagged users also get invited: If you’re saving your tags to facebook, all the tagged users will get a notification allowing them to join the fun
• And yeah – lots and lots of bug fixes: Keep reporting those annoyances, we’re plowing through them as quickly as we can

Thanks for checking us out! Keep sending your feedback to feedback@face.com, and stay tuned for more updates!

Do you like to upload photos to Facebook? Are you a tagging junkie? Well, then, prepare to be stoked.  Today we are announcing Photo Tagger, a new application for the people who want to tag photos in Facebook (especially for those of us with a bunch of albums we “should” tag, and just haven’t gotten around to yet).

Photo Tagger lets you choose albums (yours or your friends’) to scan for faces. Photo Tagger then batches the people it finds into groups and suggests tags for these people:

By finding people for you, and batching them together Photo Tagger lets you tag your albums in a fraction of the time it would normally take.  Power-taggers™ and mega-uploaders™ will find a lot of benefit in this application, but even the more typical users (folks who upload 50 photos once / month or so) will also find a lot of value and convenience in the app.  Once you confirm the tags in Photo Tagger, those tags are pushed out to Facebook for everyone to see.

In March we launched Photo Finder, an application on Facebook for finding photos you never knew were there.   Hundreds of people have sent us emails telling us they found photos of themselves (or their friends) that they never knew even existed.
Since Photo Finder launched, we’ve:
- scanned more than 1.5 billion photos
- identified more than 2.4 million different people

We are launching Photo Tagger in “alpha” mode, much as we did with Photo Finder.  This means that you need to “get in line” for an invitation to test the app, and we appreciate all the help we can get!  It’s entirely likely that you will see bugs and other issues – please send us any suggestions or bug reports that come up.  You can send us feedback by clicking the “Contact” link at the bottom of the page on face.com or in Facebook, or just send us an email to feedback@face.com.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for checking out Photo Tagger!

PS
As a special treat for reading this post to the end, the first 20 people to click this link will be able to add Photo Tagger right now.  Dope.

401,076,122 to be exact. That’s how many pics Photo Finder has scanned in our first 30 days. Let’s break it down…

That’s more than:
13 Million photos scanned / day.
550 Thousand an hour.
9 Thousand a minute.
150 per second.

We’re 30 days out from our launch, and since that happy day we’ve identified more than 700,000 people (and tagged them for you). We are well ahead of the pace we expected, mainly because you, our users, have a lot of friends. We mean A LOT.  The average number of photos in your social network (your photos + your friends’ photos) is an astounding 101,000! Do any of you work?

With more people using Facebook to share their photos than any other service, we’re glad Photo Finder ensures you’ll always be able to find yourself, your friends and your family. We can’t track how many of these photos are actually in focus, but it doesn’t matter because Photo Finder will still find you!

Achieving these kinds of numbers with our small group of Alpha testers is very exciting, but now we want to let more people use Photo Finder. Every day we release more invites to join the application, so if you’ve registered for Photo Finder, expect to be hearing from us soon.

To our Alpha testers – thank you for helping us become so  successful!  We couldn’t have gotten here without you, and we’re only going to make your experience better.  We also know that (like so many other activities) looking at photos is more fun with a friend.  So during the next couple of weeks we’ll be giving each of our alpha testers 3 invites.  This will roll out gradually to our alpha testers over the next couple weeks, so keep an eye out.  You’ll be able to invite up to 3 people to add Photo Finder and share the love.  (More invites will come, we promise!)

As always, if you have questions, comments, suggestions, or anything else you want to say feel free to email us, comment here on the blog, or tweet at us.

Privacy is one of those things that may not seem visible on the surface of our products, but is definitely being enforced behind the scenes. During recent discussions some folks raised questions regarding how we’re handling privacy, and we thought it would be great to open up that conversation, get your feedback, and make our stance on privacy very clear.

What we’re about
Face.com helps find photos of you, of friends, and lets you have some fun with Facebook photo albums. We’re not about encouraging stalkers, embarrassing anyone, or selling information to some basement dwelling government orgs.

Knowing when there are new photos of you
One cool feature of Photo Finder is telling you when it finds a new photo of you, which you can either tag or hide – it’s up to you.  If you’re not yet a Photo Finder alpha tester, you can see your auto-tagged photos here.

All your privacy settings apply
Facebook is a great platform for socializing while using your real identity. That said, privacy in a social environment is a balancing act. Facebook’s default approach is to allow your circle of friend, friends-of-friends or entire network access to most of your information. But Facebook lets you to change and control who gets to see what. To learn more about what facebook applications can and cannot do, head over to this page.

Photo Finder uses Facebook’s platform APIs to mirror the Facebook privacy settings of you and your friends, and we never collect or share more than your current Facebook settings allow. For example, if you chose to hide your facebook tags, Photo Finder will do the same, and will only show your auto-tags to you. Same goes for specific privacy settings for photos and albums.

Tweaking your facebook privacy settings
Applications on facebook can receive their own settings, allowing you to change how your information is shared. You can change those settings by clicking the settings menu, then privacy settings, and then either “profile” which applies to both users and applications, or just “applications”.
Any changes you make will apply immediately, and will apply to accessing both past and future information.

Got questions?
We’d love to hear what you think, voice it here on our blog or send us a message at feedback@face.com.

Two weeks into our alpha launch, we thought we’d share some early stats, thoughts, and a little message to all the kind people who are patiently waiting to join (read on).

On Mar 24th we announced our alpha program with amazing response, and got covered by Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, All Facebook, InsideFacebook and more. All of our invites were snaffled up minutes after the announcement, and our 1000 alpha users are finding new photos, and identifying bugs… yeah, we have those too, and we’re releasing maintenance releases every few days.

Many thousands of people have requested an invite to join the alpha. We are trying hard to add people to the app, while scaling our system carefully and keeping the user experience positive for people. We’re inviting people in the order in which they registered, sending blocks of invites over the next few days, and watching to see how the system handles the load. From time to time, we might also release small blocks of new invites via blog post or other media. Keep an eye out, first come first served.

“I want to see my photos, NOW!”

For those of you who are still waiting to join but want to know if Photo Finder found untagged photos of you – install our application by following this link. This will give you limited access to the app and let you check out photos of yourself, but not your friends.  If Photo Finder found untagged photos of you, you’ll be able to view, approve, correct, or hide the results. Clicking on the giant “Apply to alpha” will take you to our registration page, letting us know that you want to join the alpha. This is a way for you to play with the app and find your photos, but doesn’t put as much load on our system as a full install.  (Installing at this stage will not affect the order in which you’ll be able to use the full app.)

We’d like to shout out a big thank you to all our testers, bug reporters, and to all the people who’ve requested to join. We’re working hard to improve the experience,  and it’s very gratifying to know when it works for you. Please give us feedback, here on the blog or in the app.

And, as a special reward for reading a company blog… the first 20 people to click this link will be able to add the Photo Finder app immediately! (Rewards are fun)

Today we got our first chance to speak in public about face.com. It was at Techonomy, a great event that “delves into the business and economy behind the Web 2.0 technological revolution”. The 6 selected companies were all fresh, innovative, and very cool. Each company had its 7 minutes to speak followed by a round of questions and comments from the on-stage panelists. All the speakers put on a great show, and the tweets in the background kept the crowd engaged. Sarah Lacy wrapped up the event, giving a chance for the crowd to vote for their favorite company. We were very honored to be selected as the best in show by the crowd, for us it was great to get this recognition – thanks to all of those who voted!

For the first time we’ve also demo’d face.com’s face recognition engine in action, processing a staggering 50 photos/sec on my laptop. Check it out in this flixwagon video:

It was a great way to start the day, thanks to the great work by the organizers, and the great crowd that showed up.