UPDATED 12:11 EDT / DECEMBER 16 2010

Facebook Experiencing Huge Profits, Brings Facial Recognition to Photos

Facebook has launched the facial recognition feature to its photo tagging feature, called Tag Suggestions. Facebook photos is one of the most popular features of this social networking site and this latest feature will automatically suggest who users should tag in photos based on facial recognition technology. Tag Suggestions will be available to U.S. users next week.

According to Chris Cox, Facebook Vice President of Product, Tag Suggestions is built with in-house as well as partner’s technology. With the help of this feature, one can group similar faces together and automatically suggest the friend they should tag them with. It is considered as one of the most controversial and biggest upgrades by Facebook and the FB team expects to become addicting very soon.

Besides this development, the social networking giant is also experiencing tremendous growth and huge profits. The company will soon bring out its 2010-report, and is expected to generate revenue of about $2 billion for the year.  As Facebook is a privately held company (still), it doesn’t disclose its revenue figures publicly. But we can definitely conjecture around its revenue,  as it is the world’s largest Web social network with roughly half a billion users.

A recent press release by the company also reported that Facebook Gets Six U.S. Cities Closer to $1.5 Million from Walmart for Hunger Relief. The countdown for the The “Fighting Hunger Together” Facebook campaign is on and will end on 12:00 A.M. on January 1, 2011.  Charitable efforts have been a key focus for the social network and its founder, especially these past few months, as Zuckerberg is being compared more and more to his industry predecessors like Bill Gates.

The story doesn’t end here, as none other than Mark Zuckerberg has bagged the 2010 TIME Person of the Year title, and the credit goes to the unrivaled popularity of Facebook, the social networking site founded by this “boy genius.”  He has become one of the youngest billionaires in United States. Talking about his son Mark, father Ed said,

“For some kids, their questions could be answered with a simple yes or no. For Mark, if he asked for something, yes by itself would work, but no required much more. If you were going to say no to him, you had better be prepared with a strong argument backed by facts, experiences, logic, reasons. We envisioned him becoming a lawyer one day, with a near 100% success rate of convincing juries.”


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