billy gillispie

Start-up Face.com announced a Facebook application on Tuesday called Photo Finder that can identify your contacts' faces--and your own--on the social-networking site.
billy gillispie
The software analyzes photos among your contacts, suggesting tags for faces it recognizes and monitoring new uploads for more. The software presents an array of your contacts' photos, letting you accept or reject suggested names for the people the application has identified.

In my not-so-extensive testing, I found that the face recognition technology really does make it easier to discover photos of people you know. It surfaced dozens of untagged pictures among my network of contacts, all with the correct name suggested.

We have 100 invitations for the application, which is in alpha testing. Click here if you want one--first come, first served.

Since those photographed were generally shown in their own photo galleries, it wouldn't have been tough for to find them on my own, but the application was more useful in uncovering unknown images when dealing with people posted on others' photo galleries. I didn't try it long enough to see how well it spotted photos of me showing up in others' photos, which strikes me as one use case in which people would be particularly interested.

Face recognition in photos can be a powerful tool because it means computers can know people's identities. That photo metadata is information that computers can process, for example, when supplying search results. Apple built face recognition into its newest version of iPhoto, and Google has the technology in its Picasa Web Albums site for photo sharing. billy gillispie

Not integrated with Facebook
One key point, though: the identification tags that Photo Finder supplies are visible only through the application. They aren't integrated with Facebook's tag system, so the implications and actions you take through Photo Finder are limited only to that application.