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.
This one is aimed at all our alpha testers: as some of you noticed, over the past day access to photos was flaky, with pages showing fewer tags than expected, blocked friend pages, and other issues loading photos. A quick check revealed that one of Facebook’s APIs wasn’t returning results, which resulted in occasional access to friend and photo tags. At first we took it personally, but as time passed more application developers posted similar issues on the forums. We rushed our post to Facebook’s developer forum and registerred bug management system, hoping for a quick turnaround. And quick it was. The facebook developers quickly took over and released a hotfix which seems to do the trick, gradually restoring access to photo tags.
We’d love to hear back how this affected your experience, and as always, your bug reports when you’re bouncing into issues. We’ll continue to followup this issue closely until we can safely put it behind us.
Welcome to face.com, and thanks for checking us out!
For a while we’ve been stealthy about what we’re doing (working hard on developing our face recognition tech.) We’re about helping people find photos, and as a first service we’re releasing a Facebook app called Photo Finder, which scans public photos in your social network and suggests tags for untagged faces. It’s a great way to find photos of yourself (or your friends) that you never knew existed, and stay up to date with your friends latest pics.
Today we’ve started inviting people into Photo Finder’s alpha. We’re going to start with 1000 people and see how it goes (we’re trying not to break the Internet) and we’ll release more invites as we grow. Check back from time to time, because we may offer up some on the spot invites now and again.
We’d also love to hear back from our alpha users about bugs and other issues here, and your comments on our application about page. Meanwhile you’re welcome to sign up here, and follow us on the blog.
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