Grab a salt shaker, unscrew the cap, suck back all the grains of salt. Now you’re ready for the latest Facebook rumor. Big Face is said to be thick into negotiations to acquire Face.com, an Israeli facial recognition software company.
CNET reports that the two companies have some connections that extend beyond their nomenclature:
The technology made a splash in 2009 when it released Photo Tagger, a free third-party application for Facebook that uses facial recognition technology to automatically tag photos of people, as well as a recognition-based alert service for Facebook. In 2010, Face.com released an open API to the public that allows third-party developers to incorporate the technology in their apps.
Facebook has been circling around facial recognition technology for a while and even using it to some limited degree on its site. The idea is that if you post a picture from a party on your Timeline, the site will be able to spot everyone in the crowd, identify them, have everyone connected and sharing, have everyone spend more time on the site, then they can serve you ads based on who you are based on who you know. FOLLOW THE MONEY. BUT DOES FACEBOOK EVEN HAVE ANY MONEY ANYMORE AFTER THAT IPO? MY CAPS LOCK BUTTON IS STUCK. Ah, that’s better.
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