Google+ Gets Face Recognition, Deeper Gmail Integration

Google is on fire today: besides introducing the new activities recommendation engine Schemer, and the news aggregator Currents, the company also improved Google+ with several nifty features, including face detection.

The new feature is called Find my Face, and it helps tag photos of people in pictures, provided they’ve activated the feature.


Google has obviously learned a lesson from Facebook, which suffered some backlash – even an EU probe – over turning its face recognition feature on by default. In Google+, you can accept or reject someone tagging you or turn the feature on and off and, most importantly, the feature is opt-in.

Find my Face will be rolling out to users over the next couple of days.

Gmail has also been upgraded with a couple of social networking features, making it easier to add people to your Google+ Circles from Gmail and share stuff on Google+ without leaving your inbox.
Furthermore, you can now also filter messages in Gmail according to your Circles; for example, you can see only the messages from your family, work colleagues or any other group of people you’ve defined as a Circle.

Google will be rolling out these new features to users’ Gmail and Gmail Contacts over the next couple of days.