Facebook has acquired Face.com. What an amazing move for Facebook.

Face.com is a technology company with the best-in-class face recognition software. They offer a platform for developers and publishers to automatically detect and recognize faces in photos using a robust, free, REST API.

This API allows third-party developers to create their own original apps that leverage their face recognition technology, algorithms, and database of tagged faces.

Face.com builds facial recognition software that is not only highly accurate, but also works efficiently at web-scale. Face.com’s facial recognition analytics are able to identify faces well, despite difficult circumstances like poor lighting, poor focus, subjects wearing eyeglasses, facial hair, and even Halloween costumes. Face recognition isn’t just for the government or in the movies – you can use it yourself in all kinds of ways, from tagging photos to social networking.

Face.com has raised in the past a total of $5.3 million in funding for their face recognition technology. A Series A round, totaling $1 million was raised in February 2009. In September 2010, the company announced that it had closed a Series B round of $4.3 million,led by previous investor Rhodium and Russia-based investor Yandex. Knowing that the Face.com was a Tel Aviv-based technology company that developed the platform.

Will Face.com bring security issues to some countries and the world? That is the question that Face.com will answer with time and spread.

Some app examples that you will use:

Tagger Widget- Using face.com’s Javascript Tagger Widget to quickly add a tagging experience

Poster Yourself – Using the API to automatically plug friend faces into posters and e-cards

CelebrityFindr – A full fledged mini site that uses face recognition to search and filter celebrity photos found on Twitter’s photo feed.

Developers can go to http://developers.face.com/ for face.com API (Beta).

You can download it from the App Store.

Sources: Face.com; Wikipedia;  Tech Today Show