7 Billion Scanned Photos Later, Face.com Opens Up To Developers

Facial recognition technology startup Face.com publicly launched at last year’s Techonomy event in Tel Aviv, Israel. Today thus marks an excellent time for them to make some announcements, as it is the evening prior to Techonomy 2010, which I’m attending.

The company is today publicly launching a developer community and open API, providing third-party developers access to their facial recognition technology, including the algorithm that powers their Facebook applications Photo Finder and Photo Tagger.

The former app saw one hell of a kick-off, tagging up to 400 million photos in its first month. A year later, Face.com’s Facebook apps have scanned over 7 billion photos in total and identified no less than 52 million faces.

Developers who are interested in building their own facial recognition apps can now get full access to the open Face.com API, free of charge. That basically means developers can tap into Face.com’s face detection and recognition technology and create brand new ways for friends to engage through photos at zero cost. Hard to beat that offer.

Face.com is letting any developer tap into their tech through simple REST API calls, and via Facebook’s and Twitter’s APIs also enable developers to apply their tried face recognition tech to their users’ social graphs.

Here are some examples of ways the Face Open API and database have already been integrated: Celeb-Finder/Twitterazzi, Tagger Widget and PosterYourself.

Let us know what you come up with!