Facebook will employ face recognition software to make tagging easier (Credit: Facebook) 
 
 Just a few hours after Time magazine anointed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg "Person of the Year," Zuckerberg's company announced yet another new service that will attempt to recognize pictures of your friends based on their facial characteristics. 
 
 Starting next week, Facebook will start using face recognition technology to assist its users in tagging pictures of friends. 
 
 Privacy Remains the Same 
 
 Facebook officials told me that the new service will not change the privacy settings related to tagging -- users will still get a notice if they are tagged and can remove the tag of any photos. Also, users continue to have control over who tags them. 
 
 Another comforting fact about the new tagging service is that it's not automatic. When you upload an album, Facebook will attempt to recognize the people in it. If it finds what it thinks is a match it will ask you to confirm. If you do nothing, the photo won't be tagged. 
 
 As has long been the case with photos, you will only be able to tag people you are friends with and, presumably to improve accuracy, Facebook will only compare the pictures against a relatively small sub-set of your friends -- perhaps as few as the 30 people you communicate with most often, which, according to computer scientists who study face recognition, can improve the accuracy. 
 
 Facebook will also be allowing users to opt-out of having their name suggested to friends during the photo tagging process. If you disable "Suggest photos of me to friends," your name will "no longer be suggested in photo tags, though friends can still tag you manually," according to the Facebook blog. 
 
 From a privacy standpoint this move should have little impact but it is yet one more example of how Facebook is encouraging people to share information, including photos 
 
 Hard to Do 
 
 Face recognition remain hard to do said Erick Learned-Miller, an associate professor of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts whose research includes "machine learning" and "computer vision. And it's especially difficult if you're using a very large database. "The larger the number of people you are trying to identify, the more difficult the problem" he said in an interview. 
 
 "Up to now the reliability of face recognition is not very good," he said. "if you could be right more than half the time that would be very very good." 
 
 Learned-Miller calls Facebook's plan to allow the user to confirm whether the photograph is accurately identified "makes a lot of sense," referring to the process as a "human in the loop method where you don't commit to a particular decision but you try to use the computer as a screen step that improves your own efficiency." 
 
 It also helps that Facebook can take advantage of previous tagging. If a person has been tagged in multiple photographs, that improves the chances of it working, according to computer scientists I spoke with. 
 
 Rolling Out Gradually 
 
 Facebook will roll out the service to a small number of users next week and expand from there. It will initially only be available in the United States. 
 
 This announcement follows one in September when Facebook announced group tagging, an improved photo viewer and higher-resolution images. More than 100 million photos are uploaded daily, according to Facebook officials. 
 
 Larry Magid is co-director of ConnectSafely.org, a non-profit Internet safety organization that receives financial support from several technology companies including Facebook. 
 
 
 
 Follow Larry Magid on Twitter: www.twitter.com/larrymagid ||||| Facebook Inc., the world’s most popular social-networking service, is likely to generate 2010 revenue of about $2 billion, a larger sum than projected earlier, according to three people familiar with the matter. 
 
 Sales will more than double from 2009, said the people, who declined to be identified because the privately held company doesn’t disclose revenue. Facebook had $700 million to $800 million in sales last year, and the 2010 figure was previously expected to be closer to $1.5 billion, according to two other people familiar with the matter earlier this year. 
 
 Facebook’s more than half a billion users have made it an attractive target for advertisers, including Coca-Cola Co., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Adidas AG. In October, Facebook surpassed Yahoo! Inc. when ranked by the number of global users, making it No. 3 behind Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., according to ComScore Inc., a research firm in Reston, Virginia. 
 
 “The love affair of consumers with social networks is an abiding one,” said Karsten Weide, an analyst at IDC in San Mateo, California. “All the big brands are there.” 
 
 Jonathan Thaw, a spokesman for Palo Alto, California-based Facebook, declined to comment. 
 
 Facebook, founded in 2004, would reach $2 billion faster than Yahoo and at almost the same pace as Google. Yahoo, founded in 1994, posted revenue of $1.6 billion in 2003 and $3.6 billion in 2004. Google, founded in 1998, reached $1.5 billion in 2003 and then $3.2 billion in 2004. 
 
 ‘Person of Year’ 
 
 Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive officer, was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” yesterday. The publication noted his role in “creating a new system of exchanging information” and “changing how we all live our lives.” 
 
 Zuckerberg, 26, created Facebook for college students when he was a sophomore at Harvard University. After opening the site to people outside of higher education, the company surpassed News Corp.’s MySpace as the No. 1 social network two years ago. Facebook users now post a billion pieces of content, such as photos and messages, every day, Time said. 
 
 Facebook has maintained ad prices, even as its user growth creates a surge of space for commercial messages, the company said in August. Facebook also makes money from a credits program, which lets people buy virtual items in online games. 
 
 Figuring It Out 
 
 “People are learning and they’re figuring out how they can work with Facebook,” said Christian Juhl, a president at digital ad agency Razorfish, part of Paris-based Publicis Groupe SA. “You can prove success without a massive expenditure.” 
 
 Facebook is making gains in so-called display ads -- the banners, videos and other graphical promotions that appear on websites. It may grab about 9.4 percent of that market in the U.S. this year, up from 6.6 percent in 2009, according to EMarketer Inc. in New York. 
 
 Yahoo, which leads the market, will have about 16.2 percent, down from 16.5 percent, the firm estimates. Google, which is stronger in Internet-search ads, may take 6.7 percent, up from 4.7 percent. 
 
 Facebook’s growth is also attracting investor interest. The company has a valuation of $43.1 billion, according to SharesPost Inc., an exchange for privately held stocks. That’s up more than 60 percent from three months ago and almost quadruple the level in March. 
 
 At the same time, Facebook’s expansion has increased concerns about privacy. After lawmakers and advocacy groups complained that it shares too much personal data, the company introduced simpler privacy controls in May and said it was reducing the amount of user information that’s publicly available. 
 
 “They’ve done a better job recently around privacy, which alleviates a lot of the concern,” Juhl said. “That’s something we’ll always have to keep watching. But that’s nothing new -- whether it’s Google, Microsoft, Yahoo or Facebook.” 
 
 To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Womack in San Francisco at bwomack1@bloomberg.net 
 
 To contact the editors responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net
– Get ready for another Facebook update: Next week, the site will start rolling out new face-recognition technology for photos, the Huffington Post reports. It’s “comforting” to know that the service won’t be automatic, writes Larry Magid. If the site thinks it recognizes someone, it will ask you for confirmation. Ignore it, and no tagging takes place. Privacy settings won’t change—you’ll still be alerted when you’re tagged and able to remove any unwanted tags. You’ll also be able to opt out of the service, meaning the site won’t try to recognize you in your friends’ pictures. Face-recognition technologies are still fairly unreliable, says an expert; perhaps for that reason, Facebook will attempt to identify only those of your friends you contact the most. Meanwhile, the site is expected to generate $2 billion in revenue this year, insiders tell Bloomberg.