Not long ago, I rhetorically asked on Twitter how crazy it would be if there was an app that could tell you who someone was just by scanning their face. I wasn’t asking because I thought it was particularly mind-blowing. Rather, I was asking because I legitimately thought it wouldn’t be long before someone with a brain much more powerful than my own would find a way to make it happen. But little did I know, it had probably already been done by Face.com.

Of course, Face.com itself isn’t exactly what I had envisioned.  What Face.com does is it takes the faces from your Facebook photos and “suggests” tags for them based on your friends list. I was alluding to a mobile app that could recognize anyone’s face just by analyzing an iPhone photo, say. But while heretofore Face.com seemed to have had no mobile counterpart, it does now, as earlier this morning at the Mobile World Congress, Face.com and Comverse “unveiled” a new mobile app that puts Face.com’s facial recognition algorithms to work on your mobile phone.

According to the official [three paragraph] press release (via Gizmodo), the new app can scan any person’s face and tell you who it is, while giving you direct links to his or her “profile” (which I’m assuming means Facebook) and pictures.

The press release even highlights another use – when a co-worker asks you to do something and you don’t know who to send it to, [I'm assuming] if you can somehow inconspicuously scan his or her face, the app can help you determine who they are, thus saving you some embarrassment. Of course, I’m not sure how many times that would actually happen. Frankly, if a co-worker (whose name you can’t remember) asks you to do something in person, you could just ask another co-worker who they are. And if I’m correct in assuming that you’d need to hold your phone up to scan the co-worker’s face before running the app, you’d have to be pretty James Bond-esque to pull it off. But hey, I’m just relaying how the app’s been billed, so don’t ask me.

Apparently a third, and initially somewhat confusing use is to identify “acquaintances.” The way the press release puts it – “the app has the potential to connect people before they even know each other’s names” – it sounds like you could even identify those people who you encounter that are otherwise complete strangers. But as Face.com’s CEO clarified to Gizmodo (see link above), it really just means if you’re one of those people who approves every friend request you get and now have 1000 friends you may/may not have ever actually met, the app can help you recognize those familiar but not-immediately-identifiable folks and give you a link to their profiles, so you won’t look so silly when they point out that you’re looking at them like they have three heads.

Anyways, this is one of the latest additions to the realm of augmented reality – the nexus of the real world and teh interwebs. It has been one of the hottest areas of digital technology and the one that our recent Social Media panel identified as probably the hottest of 2010. So if this seems exciting and potentially explosive to you, hold on to your hat.

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