New Facebook tech will auto-tag friends in videos

Facebook is holding its F8 event at the moment in the US, which means a whole load of new features are being announced.

The latest is a piece of technology which will use artificial intelligence to find familiar faces in your videos and auto tag your friends. That's a pretty complex thing to be doing - trawling through an entire digital file and trying to match a moving representation of a face with one that's previously stored and tagged in a still.

Facebook also said that the tag would allow users to instantly fast forward to the moment when that person appears in the video, and will help identify everyone who is in the footage.

The feature isn't ready to be rolled out just yet but it sounds like a logical extension of the proliferation of still photos which are already on the service. Video is becoming increasingly popular online and Facebook itself has an incentive to push more video sharing, especially 360 degree footage which can be viewed with their Oculus Rift headset.