When you upload photos on Facebook, you'll soon be able to tag your friends from a list of helpful suggestions, thanks to a new photo-recognition feature.
Drawing upon its vast reserves of existing tagged photos, M-Zuck's social network will soon be able to calculate exactly whose beautiful mug you're uploading, and will group similar faces together, automatically suggesting the name you should tag them with. It should save regular uploaders a few precious minutes.
According to Facebook there are now 100 million photos uploaded every day -- a factoid that, in the bleak and cruel morning after our company Christmas bash, fills Crave with a sense of immense dread and apprehension.
"Tagging is actually really important for control," says Facebook's vice president of product Chris Cox, speaking to our cousins across the pond at CNET News, "because every time a tag is created it means that there was a photo of you on the Internet that you didn't know about. Once you know that, you can remove the tag, or you can promote it to your friends, or you can write the person and say, 'I'm not that psyched about this photo.'
"We wanted to make our photos product not suck."
The facial-recognition tech is expected to roll out to users gradually, with 5 per cent of US Facebook users getting the service some time next week.
In other Facebook news, founder Mark Zuckerberg was anointed Person of the Year by Time magazine. "Facebook has merged with the social fabric of American life, and not just American but human life: nearly half of all Americans have a Facebook account, but 70 per cent of Facebook users live outside the US," said the magazine's lead essay.
"It's a permanent fact of our global social reality. We have entered the Facebook age, and Mark Zuckerberg is the man who brought us here."
What do you think of the new photo service? It sounds useful, but also maybe a little creepy. Are you psyched about photo-recognition, or would you rather Facebook kept its nose out of your... er, face? Let us know in the comments, or of course on our Facebook wall.
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anonymous 16 December, 2010 13:00
Don't know how, they may have just been testing it but I did get a chance one album that I uploaded to use it and it is really quite cool and makes it so much quicker to tag people
adamm255 16 December, 2010 14:45
I think that its going to integrate with iPhoto at somepoint, which uses the same technique when you import photos to it. When you upload a photo using iPhoto, if you've linked it with facebook, will then tag the person when you upload.
Kinda creepy, but I think an obvious progression. However, this could pave the way for the Minority Report style surveillance if governments are allowed to access the recognition data.
adamm255 16 December, 2010 14:47
Man that would be so easy too, with the modern world of API's. Jesus, if Facebook made this an API then all they needed to do is workout all faces in an image, call upon the API to get a name!
Orwell would have something to say about this!
adamm255 16 December, 2010 14:48
At least my iPhoto library is local, and all the face recognition isn't shared!
/rant
Amando 16 December, 2010 18:56
Google Picasa has been doing this for 2-3 years. The face recognition feature is accurate and fast. It makes short work of finding and indexing photos.
I appreciate it when organising my photo collection, but the feature certainly sparks conversations among Picasa users. It's a game changer. If rolled out as a feature of Internet-wide image search, we would find ourselves living in a different kind of world at once. For many individuals that world would not be a better one.
Thankfully, Google never did this. It would have been a simple matter, at any time in the past year, for Google to incorporate facial search into image search. They seem content to pass on being the entity that plunges us into that new world.
Between the two of them Facebook and Microsoft Bing may be entity that opens that particular Pandora's box. At the very least, it seems Facebook will be testing the water to see how users react to such a feature working on a large scale.
grandcruclasse 17 December, 2010 11:30
I don't exist on Facebook or any of the other networks and never will. I have e-mail and a mobile phone. That is enough for me. I don't want or need Facebook and have turned down probably 200-300 invitations over the last couple of years. Have I lost contact with any friends? Have I become a social outcast? Have I missed anything important? Have I ended up looking like a fool because of something said or posted on Facebook?
No.
Grier78 17 December, 2010 13:41
I agree with adamm255, will this only tag people you are friends with or will I be able to take a picture of a random person on the street and obtain their name from facial recognition?
billfred 19 December, 2010 13:45
Speaking of iPhoto integration and the fact Picasa has done this for ages, I was kinda hoping that it would let me upload straight from Picasa and have been wondering this for a while, saves the faff of tagging.
Anonymous 20 December, 2010 15:52
This has made Facebook even more dangerous and im really fed up with it and have deleted my account. Facebook has no regard for privacy and people should realise this and switch to more secure sites such as Mycube and Diaspora.