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Faces.com: Social network or publishing tool?

Rafe Needleman Former Editor at Large
Rafe Needleman reviews mobile apps and products for fun, and picks startups apart when he gets bored. He has evaluated thousands of new companies, most of which have since gone out of business.
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Rafe Needleman
2 min read

Faces.com is a very good media publishing site that's masquerading as a social network. Unlike MySpace, once you are logged in to your Faces account, the system doesn't bludgeon you with what other random people are doing.

More than a tool for "friending," Faces looks like a good place to publish a profile, a blog, a photo gallery, or music you want to share. The system provides code for slideshows and "tunefeeds" that you can embed into any other blog or even another social network like MySpace.

Downsides: It would be better if Faces could handle the details of publishing the feeds itself, instead of just giving you code. Also, there's no support for video yet.

But Faces has excellent uploading tools, including a Web-based Java uploader, a Windows desktop uploader, cellphone upload capabilities (with detailed instructions for major US carriers), and even a synchronization tool that automatically posts to your profile new images that you put in specific directories on your PC.

Faces is also unusual in that it's not completely free. You can upload 500MB a month of data and generate 10GB a month of network traffic for no charge, but if you want to use more than that (for example, if you want to use Faces as a file storage system for all your photos), you'll want a pro account, for $25 a year.

Due to its quiet social network features, I don't see Faces becoming a big dog in the MySpace market, however it is a more mature publishing tool, and worth looking into if you want to set up a quick slideshow or blog. It looks more like a competitor to Six Apart's upcoming Vox blogging platform.