Facebook may not have applied for the .face gTLD, but the company has now acquired Face.com. With this acquisition, however, Facebook is getting much more than a good domain name.
The acquisition isn’t a total surprise. We’ve reported on rumors that Facebook might buy at least part of the facial recognition technology company, but apparently the freshly public social network company decided to grab the whole thing.
WebProNews spoke with Face.com CEO Gil Hirsch a couple months ago, who told us “People are interested to harvest as much information they can from photos and videos…to connect with other people.”
Face.com already powers the popular Photo Finder and Photo Tagger apps on Facebook, and it’s not hard to see why Facebook itself would be interested in having Face.com as part of its own team. Face.com sends alerts to Facebook users when it thinks a photo or video of that person has been uploaded.
“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,” said Hirsch in a blog post today. “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.”
In March, Face.com added age detection to its API in an effort to make fake IDs obsolete. As part of Facebook, with its over 900 million users, perhaps that’s not such an unattainable goal.
Face.com says it will continue to support its current developer community, and will continue to announce updates on the Face.com blog.
Terms of the deal have not been disclosed. Rumors last month had the price pegged at around $100 million.