Another cool thing out of Israel. While everybody’s wondering if they’re going to stop building in the West Bank, the Hi-Techers are busy ignoring politics and creating software applications, such as the Face.com Friend Finder—a Facebook face-searcher!

I know, I know, everybody likes video, so here’s a video.

In short, your face is probably everywhere all over facebook. Maybe even in places you don’t want it to be! Is it possible? Yes…but if you’re not tagged, how ever will you find it? Use the friend finder, upload your face, and it will cycle through your friends to find you, or whoever you put in to the finder.

There are 15 billion pictures on Facebook, and about 60% of all photos on the web can be found on Facebook. Now that’s crazy. Here are some amazing quotes from Israel21c:

“In the first month of our alpha test, we scanned some 400 million photos, identifying about 700,000 people, with users confirming the identities of about 150,000 people,” says Gil Hirsch, Face.com’s CEO and co-founder. Hirsch decided to work initially with Facebook because it was a good place to get started, but the technology goes far beyond identifying friends you don’t know.

“Without getting too technical, our technology looks at information that is already known – photos in your Facebook account, for example – and compares them with elements of other photos with unknown elements. Our algorithms compare the photos, and Friend Finder makes an educated guess on the identity of a person. The user is then asked to confirm, and a tag is attached to the identified person, with that photo now added to the recognition database,” he says.

In other words, Face.com’s technology learns as it goes. (Insert Twilight Zone music theme here. *neenee-neenee neenee-neenee*)

This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 10:23 am and is filed under Image, Newcomers, Reviews, Verticals, Visual. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.