It was only back in April when the most popular social networking website, Facebook, confirmed that it has acquired Instagram, the renowned photo sharing app for a reported $1 billion in cash and stock options.
And as this week escalated, on June18, reports emerged that now Facebook is also buying Face.com, an Israeli company, which is quite famous for its facial-recognition developmental software.
Although the social network has not announced the acquisition so far, analysts are presuming that Facebook has bought the start up at a price tag of around $100 million, reports Mashable.
On the other end, Face.com has already confirmed about the acquisition. "We love building products, and like our friends at Facebook, we think that mobile is a critical part of people's lives as they both create and consume content, and share content with their social graph," the Face.com team wrote in a blog post on Monday. "By working with Facebook directly, and joining their team, we'll have more opportunities to build amazing products that will be employed by consumers - that's all we've ever wanted to do."
How Will Face.com Benefit Facebook?
Talking about the Face.com achievement graph chart, the facial recognition application is currently being used by 4,000 developers. And at the same time, the company also specializes in the expertise of mobile facial recognition. Its Klik app tags people within photos, before they are even taken, or while the user is holding their phone up.
According to the company's website, Face.com technology can identify subjects "despite difficult circumstances like poor lighting, poor focus, subjects wearing eyeglasses, facial hair, and evenHalloween costumes." That technology, in turn, is used in apps such as Photo Tagger, which identifies and groups faces in online photo albums.
While, Google and Apple also offer facial recognition technology to tag people in pictures, Face.com actually distinguishes itself from others with its mobile focus. Consequently, this would offer Facebook users the advantage of quickly tagging friends while uploading on the go.
Hence, the easier it would be for Facebook users to tag friends from their phones, the more likely they would stick with Facebook, than spending time on a separate photo-taking mobile app.
Moreover, the more photos users tag, the more they would be sharing with friends, which means more visits to Facebook to view the photos, and more time on the service to browse.
Accordingly, more time spent means more opportunity for ad revenue. Additionally, information about which friends are in users' photos allows Facebook to better filter users' news feeds and better target ads.
Meanwhile, Face.com already offers two Facebook apps: Photo Finder and Photo Tagger, which let users find untagged pictures of themselves and their friends and then tag them as a group.
Face.com launched its open API in 2010, and has, reportedly, mentioned that it is keen to continue supporting developers.
