face.com

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.

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.

- team face.com

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.

Stay Tuned!