Since we launched FaceStat, we’ve noticed that some of our users have been uploading pictures of many things other than their face. We’ve seen cats, dogs, ultrasounds, babies, cartoons, and all sorts of things. This inspired us to think about how to apply the FaceStat model to other types of items.

Some of us here are really into shoes, and for the last couple weeks we’ve been asking users to judge interesting pairs of shoes, with questions like “How long could you wear this shoe?”, or “Does this shoe say single or taken?”. The response has been very positive, and users have even been emailing us their shoes to add to our collection.

So we invite our friendly blog readers to check out ShoeStat, an experimental site which is a lot like FaceStat but for people into shoes. Let us know what you think.

FaceStat uses Amazon’s S3 service to store and serve most images. Today they went down for 7 hours. During this time, FaceStat was completely broken — users couldn’t upload or view images, which is the point of the site.

They first mention “elevated error rates” at 9:05am; but our own logs indicate they went down 20 minutes before that. We guess “elevated error rates” is the new euphemism for “we are completely f’d and taking you down with us.”

Using Amazon’s S3 has about the same cost and complexity as hosting the images ourselves, but we had thought that the reliability of Amazon would be significantly higher. But that now seems wrong. Here’s a chart of this month’s FaceStat downtimes by cause:

It wasn’t just us — (more…)

Since we launched FaceStat we’ve collected over 100,000 images of people with different types of labels. Explore the faces and labels with our new interface:

Update 7/11: The graph explorer is now part of the main facestat.com site! Check it out: facestat.com/cloud. And stay on FaceStat to help us collect more data :)