Archive for category Web

Facebook and Facial Recognition: An Obvious Marriage?

Posted by Matt in Social Networks on October 1st, 2009

The science of recognizing a face and the intelligence to recognize the same one twice. Or a million times. That’s one of 2009’s crowning technological achievements. Oh, sure, there have been facial recognition algorithms around for years, but up until this year, we haven’t had that feature on a mainstream consumer level. Within the past year, we’ve seen point-and-shoot digital cameras receive the ability to focus on individual faces in a frame and some of those cameras can even detect whether or not you’re smiling (and summarily refuse to snap the photo!). Standalone desktop applications like Apple iPhoto and Google Picasa will now scan your entire photo library for faces and once you’ve given the software some training, it’ll auto-detect and tag the mugs of family, friends, and maybe even your dog. In fact, Google’s online photo catalog software, Picasa Web Albums, has been doing the same thing for awhile as well. It’s a feature that makes cataloging photos much, much easier. No longer must you rely on finding an exact folder or using a non-smart desktop search tool to find the person you’re looking for. As long as you can remember their name, you can find their face.

For as long as most of us can remember, Facebook has allowed photo tagging. Upload your photos, click a cross-hair across a person’s face, and type in their name. If they’re using Facebook, it’ll link directly to their profile page and notify them that their face is now floating around the ‘net for any of their friends to see. A cool feature, very informative, and a stalker’s dream. But one thing that’s been bugging me for awhile is: why stop there?

Facebook, no doubt, has tens of petabytes worth of data stored across its servers and much of that is photo related. People upload terabytes worth of photos every day. Why isn’t Facebook using all that meta information to make your life easier? Imagine uploading 75 pictures of you and your friends from last week’s party. Facebook would then analyze each photo, tag everyone it recognizes from your friends list, and give you a confirmation page to adjust any of the tags. My guess is that the system wouldn’t even require training from the user as it could pull aggregate data from profile pictures and other tagged photos in order to make the whole process incredibly quick and easy. The question isn’t if they could do this, it’s why have they not?

Two reasons come immediately to mind, the first being that of privacy concerns. Suddenly you’ve turned Facebook into a huge searchable photo database that could make any law enforcement officer’s day by providing thousands of images and demographics of people not available in government or criminal databases. You’d also be presenting yourself as a target for some dangerous information leakage if Facebook were ever breached. This concern, I believe, is mostly without a logical base. Users continue to manually tag friends anyway and unless you disable the tagging system altogether, privacy will always be a concern.

The second potential issue is one of raw processing power. For instance, it took my beefy ThinkPad about 4 hours to sort through my collection of approximately 25,000 photos. That’s one dual core CPU’s near best effort since the average processor utilization was somewhere around 70%. I’m guessing Picasa was leaving some of the CPU free so that the machine didn’t slow to a complete crawl. Imagine then the billions of photos stored across Facebook servers. The company would need to create a system to process every single photo containing a face, match already associated tags, and create a massive database containing the results. This process would require not only a lot of time, but much additional storage space as well. Fortunately, storage is cheap these days–unfortunately the required number of extra CPUs and RAM modules are not.

As a side note, there was a Facebook Application released in the not-too-distant past allowing users to scan their photos for faces, but my guess is that without widespread use (and some major venture capital), the corresponding company and software didn’t get too far.

Ultimately, I think facial recognition is something that Facebook should and will eventually add to it’s service. My guess is that this feature is already in the works; however, Facebook usually holds close its cards until they’re ready for some sort of official release plan. Keep watching Facebook for any new information, and of course, you’ll find the details here as well when the announcement does arrive. My prediction? We’ll see something emerge by the end of 2010.

Cross your fingers…

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Why we need multiple web browsers

Posted by Matt in Browsers, Web on September 26th, 2009

Ask any ten different people what their favorite browser is and it’s possible you might possibly end up with ten completely different opinions. That’s because these days browsers are a dime a dozen and it’s mostly up to the consumer which browser he or she uses. Major players in today’s market include Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, and Opera. With the exception of Internet Explorer, all of these browsers are more or less available for any OS you use. But which one is the right browser? Which is the best? That question has become the object of many a debate and a post like this can’t settle it once and for all–especially with the daily changing face of technology. But although some web developers (designers especially) would like to have only one global browser (or at least force all browsers to use the same rendering engine), there is actually good reason in having a diverse market.

The hating of Internet Explorer

There’s no question that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer remains the dominant browser on the market at this time. Between the number of users surfing with version 6, 7, or 8, well over 50% of the world is still IE-centric. Yet you’ll find developers, designers, and consumers have developed the widespread opinion that Internet Explorer is bad. Period. This, simply, is not true.

Back when Internet Explorer 6 was released with Windows XP in 2001, it really began to change the face of the Internet itself. We started to see a lot more plugins being written to make websites more “dynamic.” Broadband connections were seriously beginning to take off and the phenomenon we now know as Google was setting the stage to become one of the Internet’s dominating forces. IE6 was compliant with HTML4 web standards, made possible the widespread use of CSS, and was fast and light. As an integral part of the Windows operating system, it took full advantage of certain performance enhancements. IE6, as much as it is despised now for it’s lack of HTML standards support, is really partially responsible for getting us where we are today. Versions 7 and 8 may have been Microsoft’s catch-up game, but as far as standards-compliant browsers go, things have come a long way since 2001.

Enter Firefox

The next major market player was officially introduced in 2005 by Mozilla, creator of Firefox’s ancestors Mozilla Suite and Netscape. Version 1.0 was slow to catch on outside the developer community, but many saw it as a good future competitor to Microsoft’s browser market domination. Firefox re-defined the way we use the Internet by successfully introducing tabbed-browsing for the first time. Some would correctly argue that Opera was the first to implement this feature, but Opera’s failure to capture significant market-share makes Firefox tabbed-browsing’s rightful ancestor. Version 2.0 saw a small spike in usage and by the time version 3.0 arrived in mid-2008, Firefox had gained significant hold on over 30% of Internet users. Firefox uses the Gecko rendering engine and has been influential in setting the bar for browsers being standards compliant.

Webkit: Safari and Chrome

Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome are even more recent additions to the browser community. Together they have further upped the ante for browser competition. Until Safari 3.0 was released, the browser was pretty unsuccessful. All but the most loyal Mac users immediately downloaded Firefox upon getting a new computer. Version 3.0 was the first truly successful implementation of Safari as a mainstream browser and version 4.0 may receive relatively equal use to Firefox on the OS X platform. As a competitor to other browsers on the Microsoft Windows platform, Safari has largely failed to capture any sort of audience.

The other Webkit-equipped browser is Google Chrome. It’s announcement was a surprise to many and it’s subsequent popularity has been an even greater shock. (I’m actually using Chrome to write this post). It remains to be seen if the trend will continue, especially as Google prepares to release their own Chrome-based operating system. Safari and Chrome contain very similar feature sets.

The Webkit and Mozilla Gecko 1.9 rendering engines are two of the first to officially support a preliminary implementation of CSS3 attributes. While Microsoft has been playing catch-up, Apple, Google, and Mozilla have been pushing the envelope by rewriting their Javascript engines, introducing new browser features, and preparing to support future Internet standards. In fact, Firefox 3.5 is the first browser to support HTML 5. It includes powerful new architecture to support native HTML 5 video and local persistent storage for web applications.

We can see from the history of these various browsers that innovation drives the web. The W3C will often ratify new standards based on implementations completed by browser vendors–especially if a feature is supported across multiple browsers. We can only hope that the market-share will continue to even out as it has done up to this point. With each manufacturer seeking to bring new features to market before its competitors, we will continue to use innovative technologies in our daily online routines.

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Facebook usernames: who needs them?

Posted by Matt in Social Networks on June 17th, 2009

It seems that with every new feature addition to Facebook there are as many naysayers and unhappy customers as there are proponents of the changes. From time to time I’ve written entries here supporting some changes to the site; other times I’ve criticized certain changes for making the site all the more unfriendly and hard to use. This post briefly discusses the latest Facebook feature: profile usernames.

Who needs them?

That’s a good question. To some, perhaps this marks just another “useless” feature, but for the 5 million people who registered usernames within the first 3 days of their introduction it screams for some attention. But for those of you still holding out, let me explain a few reasons why registering your own unique Facebook username might not be such a bad idea after all.

  1. What is a username?
    For those of you who might not be familiar with how this works, a Facebook username is a unique name with no spaces that allows websites and people to quickly link to and access your Facebook profile. For example, after registering my own username, you can now access my Facebook page by visiting: http://www.facebook.com/matthamann. Yup, it’s that simple.
  2. A username could help family and friends find you faster
    These days search is king. Type your own name into Google and you might be amazed at how many results appear that link to some aspect of you, whether it be your blog, Facebook profile, a news article from high school or college, or who knows what else? The fact of the matter is: if you have any of these social networking devices, you’re not interested in hiding your identity from the rest of the world. If you were, you wouldn’t use those services.
  3. It’s way more friendly
    Before Facebook usernames existed, any time an individual needed to directly access or link to a user’s profile, they would have to enter a url similar to this one: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=630269242. Trust me, nobody wants to have to worry about long complicated stuff like that. Visiting http://www.facebook.com/matthamann is just so much easier to use and remember. Of course, picking a username like “dragonboy673″ probably won’t help you much unless you’re well known around the ‘Net by that moniker, but picking something closely related to who you are or what you do can drastically improve your visibility.

Are there more reasons to go ahead and get a Facebook username? Why don’t you let me know by leaving a comment?

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Simple formatting in Facebook chat

Posted by Matt in Social Networks on June 3rd, 2009

While perhaps obvious to some, there are a couple commands you can use to add simple font formatting to the messages you send via Facebook chat. While there’s nothing fancy just yet, I suspect the platform will slowly evolve to contain other formatting options as time goes on.

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

  • For bold text, enclose words in asterisks. (e.g. *this will become bold text*)
  • For underlined text, enclose words with underscores (e.g. _this text will be come underlined_)

I’ll be sure to update this post as more options become available. In the meantime, enjoy using your new found knowledge!

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Facebook: being like everyone else isn’t always cool

Posted by Matt in Social Networks on March 24th, 2009

Maybe all the bad publicity is overstated, but since nearly 2 million Facebook users have stated their displeasure at the site’s recent redesign, I think perhaps something’s amiss.

In the summer of 2008 Facebook spent quite a while working on a complete site revamp with some new features, re-arranged interface, and so on. They previewed many of those new features to some general public testers (myself included) and got quite a bit of feedback that ultimately resulted in some very nice changes to the site’s structure (in addition to solving some nasty bugs). One of the biggest advantages to that redesign was that it unified the site across the board. Ever since Facebook launched it’s Developer Platform a couple of years ago, custom applications, which often create a lot of clutter, began appearing in user profiles across the site. Facebook realized that this was a problem and sought methods for restoring the platform’s user-friendliness and generally clean, web 2.0 appeal. In my opinion, they succeeded (even though there were a few disgruntled users at first.)

Unfortunately, this time around, I think Facebook is wrong in what they’ve done. Almost overnight they released a brand-new way of interacting with friends, browsing the site, and uploading content–the new features are often extremely confusing, especially at first. My initial visit to the redesigned site brought a mix of feelings; I knew it was different and that it would take some time to figure out exactly how everything worked, but a couple weeks later I really don’t feel like I have a good grasp on things.

The one word that comes to mind when I open the new Facebook is “clutter.” There is stuff everywhere. My sidebars are filled with links, people I may know, photo updates, and I’m not even sure what else. It’s anyone’s guess as to how content is selected for those content areas. Then there’s the center/main content region. I get updates from all kinds of sources–applications, wall posts, photos, videos, notes, and the list goes on. It’s supposed to resemble some type of “real-time” feed or something (not getting the real-time part), but essentially I feel repulsed at all the information overload. It’s just way too much.

Then, how do I updatemy status (the proverbial cornerstone of all things Facebook)? But wait, it’s not really my status anymore. It’s “published content” (whatever that means) which makes me think of a blog, book, or newspaper. Certainly not the traditional “status update” we’ve had from day one. I think they’re trying to adopt the Twitter-like way of doing things, but that’s just not part of Facebook’s traditional culture. I update Twitter all the time, Facebook–a few times a week–and that’s how I like it. I don’t expect Facebook to be the catch-all for all of my social networking needs. Diversity of web services is a good thing (in my opinion) and I’d like to see them respect that.

You can’t always listen to what your users want, because everyone wants something different. So you have to listen carefully, select the good ideas, and then execute them as flawlessly as possible. I think Facebook dropped the ball this time and needs to drastically reconsider the recent update. I’m a proponent of change, but it needs to be change with a definite direction and purpose. They’ve got the purpose: be like or better than “everyone else.” Now perhaps they just need a direction. The current “middle of the stream” approach just isn’t cutting it.

Listen to your users, Facebook. I think they’re serious this time.

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