Special Instagram-edition. (Photo: flickr.com/diegorusso

Menlo Park to Israel is a long trip. So what were Facebook executives doing halfway across the world, meeting with executives from fast-growing traffic app Waze? Israeli news site Globes has a couple of ideas: 

The purpose of the talks is not known, but the two companies are reportedly headed for collaboration, possibly involving the use of Waze's application via Facebook. Alternatively, Facebook may acquire Waze.

Please note that there is precious little actual evidence that Facebook is really kicking the tires on an acquisition. (Even if the report of a meeting is true, it's entirely possible they were just in the neighborhood and felt like stopping by, for that matter.)

But it's certainly a tantalizing possibility. Waze would be the social network's third Israeli acquisition, after Face.com (in June) and Snaptu (in 2011). The app isn't Instagram-level ubiquitous just yet, but the numbers aren't too shabby either: 20 million subscribers in 45 countries, and that's having doubled over the course of six months. And, as VentureBeat recently pointed out, the app is wildly popular in its homeland:

“No-one uses Google Maps here, or iPhone maps,” says Eli, one of our hosts for the week. “Everyone uses Waze. Look – here’s how many Waze users are on the road right now…” His screen is covered with pink, smiley speech bubbles, each one contributing to the traffic Hive Mind.

Alternatively, the two companies could be cooking up some kind of partnership meant to help Facebook's fumbling in the dark for a mobile strategy. We've reached out to Waze for comment and will update if we hear anything back.

Of course, it's entirely possible Facebook executives were merely looking for some sort of directional app that could point the company towards a better stock price. Hey-o!

(H/t Forbes)

Cyborg Vision, a hack built with Face.com’s API.

After being acquired by Facebook, the facial-recognition service Face.com--a local hackathon favorite--shuts down its developers API. Too bad the company promised the exact opposite a few weeks ago. [The Next Web]

Speaking of outlawing clients, Dave Winer thinks Twitter's API is looking mighty corporate. [Scripting News]

SecondLife is a success story, says founder of SecondLife. [PandoDaily]

Google kicks off LGBT-support campaign to "legalize love," in homophobic countries around the world. [Gay Star News]

Tech companies' latest strategy against patent trolls: If you can't beat them, become a troll yourself. [WSJ]

Cyborg Vision, a hack built with Face.com’s API.

Apps sure are fun, but you've got to watch where you're leaving your Facebook Connect login credentials. Even the legit ones aren't 100 percent foolproof.

For example: Just this week, Facebook acquired Israeli facial recognition startup Face.com for $100 million or thereabouts. So we're not talking about some sloppy teenager throwing together Angry Birds ripoffs--and besides, iPhone apps are supposed to be given a thorough going-over before being allowed in the store, right?

And yet, security researcher Ashkan Soltani discovered something rather alarming while poking around the company's KLIK iOS app, which deploys its fancy face technology to help you tag friends in photos in real time and requires would-be users to use Facebook Connect. In short, the weak spot allowed any Tom, Dick, or Harry to take over your Facebook account and, if you'd linked it, your Twitter account. It's since been patched, but yikes.

Essentially, KLIK users' Facebook and Twitter authentication keys were cached and stored on Face.com's server insecurely, in such a way that an enterprising hacker could cherry-pick them. That, in turn, would allow him to take your Facebook account for a spin. As Mr. Soltani put it, "Yes, you could be 'Zuck for a day' and try to hijack @sweden to  'Out Troll' the last tweeter."

That also means access to your private photos which--thanks to that snazzy facial recognition technology that makes KLIK possible--would give this hypothetical villain the means to identify your friends as they stroll through Grand Central Terminal.

Sounding a little chagrined about the whole affair, Face.com's spokesman told us that the flaw only existed for a matter of days and was fixed "within an hour" of being reported by Mr. Soltani. Nor were any accounts actually breached, other than the user who allowed Mr. Soltani to test his theory.

"The dev team took immediate action to resolve the issue and updated deployment procedues to prevent a similar issue from taking place again," he said.

We've also reached out Facebook and Twitter for comment, and we'll update if we hear back.

Now if you'll excuse us, we're off to do a little login maintenance.

Cyborg Vision, a hack built with Face.com's API.

After rumors all but confirmed it, Face.com, the Israeli facial recognition startup, finally acknowledged on its blog today that the company has been acquired by Facebook. TechCrunch's sources estimate that the acquisition price was between $80 million and $100 million, the same figure circulated that month in the Israeli press. The deal was reportedly not part of an acqui-hire to bring Face.com's staff into the fold, but rather centered around leveraging the company's technology to help Facebook with mobile photos.

In fact, for the first deployment of its technology, Face.com released an app called KLIK that let users tag Facebook friends in real-time by scanning public photos in your social network and suggesting tags for friends. Once Face.com's technology is embedded in Facebook, users would theoretically be able get suggestions and tag friends with one click. The benefits to Facebook come in the form of increased engagement from all those "You've been tagged" notifications. As Facebook's SEC filings noted, revenues could suffer if users decreasing their engagement with mobile, the social network's Kryptonite. There's also the option of baking Face.com's technology into Instagram, Facebook's other recent mobile-minded acquisition.

As Betabeat has noted before, Face.com's API is incredibly popular in hackathons. Probably because developers can use it to build apps like Cyborg Vision, which lets see the world around you like a Terminator.

In the announcement, CEO and founder Gil Hirsch assured third-party developers that that kind of support would continue:

Now, lots of developers use Face.com technology to power various apps and make wonderful products.  We love you guys, and the plan is to continue to support our developer community.  If there are new developments you can expect to hear from us here, on the developer blog, and through our developer newsletter.

No CTO? No problem! Suddenly, Zuck's mobile future isn't looking so bleak.

TARGET ACQUIRED.

In the Venn diagram between techies and Terminator 2 fans, we're guessing the overlap is oh, let's say 100.00 percent. But a new iPhone app built by Silicon Alley's Rich Cameron and Haris Amin might be the first time the two have officially merged.

Cyborg Vision, which made its App Store debut for the iPhone and iPad 2 this morning, uses the Face.com API and Facebook to let see the world around you like a cyborg assassin sent from the future. Its best trick is actually recognizing your Facebook friends and returning a red-screen in real time with their Facebook data that would make Skynet proud. Mr. Cameron and Mr. Amin, who both work at the health and fitness app DailyBurn, first developed the concept at the video hack day, where the app took first prize. They then spent weekends getting it Apple-ready.

On the phone with Betabeat last week, Mr. Amin explained how it works: When a user opens Cyborg Vision, the app requests permission to sign in with Facebook, after which it downloads info about your friends into its database. Through the phone's camera function, you scan a friend's picture or, if they're sitting across from you, the actual friend. A request is sent to Facebook to "so it trains against your friends." The image is then run through Face.com's API, and info from the database is pushed out in real time onto your screen.

Mr. Cameron came up with the idea after the two collaborate on a slide-synching app at TechCrunch Disrupt. "I just wanted to do something that was more fun than presentation sharing—something a little less enterprise-y! We were just kind of throwing out ideas, and I threw out the idea that what if we made Terminator-vision, like it can look at somebody and recognize them and it will look like the movie and everything," Mr. Cameron said on the phone. "We love the movies. I obviously didn’t care for the third one, I don’t think anyone does. [Ed. Agreed!] That was the event of my childhood, I feel like. It was the biggest movie of any summer."

The two developers embedded some surprises in the app. "We hid some Easter eggs in the app, which I think you’re the only person who knows about besides me and Haris," said Mr. Cameron. "It recognizes Arnold Schwarzenegger, even if you’re not signed into Facebook. It will recognize certain people, maybe tied to the movies, or technology. It recognizes Steve Jobs."

Neither developer plans on quitting their day jobs, though they figure $0.99 is a fair price to pay for impressing your friends. "We’re viewing it as a parlor trick or this is a fun thing you can pull out on your friends at the bar. At the same time, it feels like the first time where facial recognition has been handed off to the consumer world where—for a dollar—you can get this on your phone and it will actually do facial recognition and identity people. It’s kind of neat," said Mr. Cameron, whose app already has a couple 5-star reviews.

"If we make millions, that’s another story."

Cyborg Vision from Rich Cameron on Vimeo.

Photo by Maya Baratz

The joy of a hack day is the time constraint, the 24-hour crunch that forces coders to get creative and make hard decisions about how much they can really accomplish. At Aviary's photo hack day yesterday, a very well-attended event that produced over 40 hacks and oodles of prizes, the most used API was from Face.com, an Israeli start-up working on facial recognition.

Connecting to their API allowed a hack to identify Facebook friends and even chart their faces across five emotions (happy, sad, angry surprised, neutral), adding emotional and social depth to projects built on short notice. 

The winner of the event was Photobot, a service that analyzed users pictures and gave the suggestions for how to improve. Honey Badger, which took second place, used the Face.com API. But the most interesting projects to come out of the event were Emotional Breakdown and Facialytics, which the judges passed over because they were suspicious something so robust could have been built in 24 hours.

Emotional Breakdown used the face.com API to scan through news feeds from sites like The Guardian and break down the emotions in photographs. While the overall paper was a mix of all emotions for example, looking at coverage from of the London riots showed most people were angry and sad, with almost no one happy. While that example seems pretty obvious, the technology could certainly be used to find some interesting patterns if used at scale and over time.

Facialytics had clearest path to a real business. The team took infrared footage of audiences watching films (mostly grabbed off YouTube) and spliced them up into single frames. Then they ran that through the face.com API to get an emotional register. "We found, surprisingly, the API was actually more effective at capturing emotion in infrared," said Jonathan Bensamoun, a senior associate at PricewaterhouseCoopers and one of the hack's four creators.

"It was incredible how quickly Face.com could process the images and that they could capture emotion for every face in the crowd," added Mr. Bensamoun. Facialytics was then able to chart the average mood of the audience throughout the film and find high points for pleasure, surprise or sadness. "I was thinking it would be tough to get cameras installed in every theater to do this," he went on to say. "But someone told me that most movie theaters already have infrared cameras to watch the audience for piracy or lewd behavior." It's easy to see how the big film studios would pay for analytics that showed exactly what parts of their films were resonating with the audience.

Gil Hirsch, Face.com CEO, was visiting from Tel Aviv. "We were just blown away by the incredible uses people found for our API. What's going on in New York right now is very impressive." Face.com isn't looking for revenue right now, said Mr. Hirsch, but rather trying to get their technology in front of as many people as possible. "We saw a bunch of projects tonight that I think have the potential to be big."

Facialytics