The debate continues. When Facebook first came up with a facility to allow tagging friends, it was a labor-some task to click every photo, then click on the "Tag Friends" option and then click on every face you see [or you want to tag], to type the name of that person.
Well, it takes less than a minute for one tag, but if this is a group photo of an entire class, or a wedding photo with all cousins, boy !!
It would take hours just to tag people in all the photos.
And why do we want to do that in the first place? Because, we always want to announce to the world that we were not alone when we did something crazy or something stupid or something great. We were with "Someone".
Being a part of "the group" is one of the needs, which is high up in Maslow's pyramid of needs.
And if the social networking corporations of today, would not have tapped into this desire of people and turned into a business value-add, it would have been a big surprise for me.
Anyways, even while people were shying away from tagging friends for the amount of work it involved, Faccebook came up with a smart way to tag friends. An excellent use of Visual Analytics - where all new faces are compared with the previous tags you have added, or the previous tags your friends have added, and even before you publish the album or photo, you are given a ready platter with all those smiley faces and a tag "suggestion" for each of this face.
The facial recognition software which most of the social network sites use is not very complex algorithm using too many biometrics, as we saw in the previous post by Sophie. They work on simple Smile recognition, a feature which is commonly available in many handy-cams, digi-cams and photo-editing software. The Analytics part comes into picture when the available database of tagged photos is processed to map with the new image under consideration. Output of running this analytics is a name of person - either your own name or name of one of your friend - commonly termed as a "suggestion".
All of this process gets completed within a few seconds, irrespective of whether you are posting a single photo or hundreds of photos. This speed of video analytics that facebook offers, is the best feature of it, as per my opinion.
This suggestion may sometimes be erroneous though, specially in case of newly added friends without any history of photo tags, but that's a very low percentage. All-in-all, if you like tagging your friends, this is a great feature available at your disposal.
On the fall-side, Every new feature has its own ill-effects and the major ill-effect of facebook tag suggestions is the tress-passing it does in someone's private space. I mean if I don't like being tagged, why should my face appear in my friends album, with a suggestion of my name?
Thankfully, after a ruckus in US about this privacy encroachment, Facebook withdrew the feature in US, and introduced it back, only after adding options [for the entire world], where-in you can deny being tagged by others; or have an authority to review and choose whether your name tag appears on a photo; or whether your name should appear as a tag suggestion.
Well, that takes care of personal privacy-trespassing issues. All-in-all there is no denying that visual analytics is the way ahead - not only for handling the security issues, but also for effectively using the social networks, considering the fast-paced lifestyle that we have.
On a more personal note, when I have enough time, I still prefer choosing whom to tag on a per-photo basis, as when I am browsing through those photos one by one and tagging people one after other, I can relive the memories associated with each picture and each person in that picture. But hey, that's just me :-)
