Our good friends from Polar Rose launched support for 23 yesterday — and today we’re very excited to announce face recognition on 23: We’ll now be making it very easy to find and name people in your photos on the site.

First, what Polar Rose does is both very simple and very tricky: They look through your photos − you can select if you want this to be only your public photos − and then find people or faces in those photos. Their brand of magic groups those people so you can easily find multiple photos of the same person, name the people in the photos and see who’s appearing next to whom in your snapshots.

So we promised it would be easy? 23 now sports a new tabs called “Faces”. When you click the tabs you’ll find a short description of how we’re integrating with Polar Rose; and to allow Polar Rose to index and match your photos, simply click the “Match faces in my 23 photos” button:

Now, you’ll be asked to log in via Facebook Connect and select how you want the facial recognition service to handle your photos.

Finally, when you’re done naming people on Polar Rose, you’ll see that your 23 photos now have fotonotes outlining the people you’ve been photographing — and that you get links to all the photos the people are appearing in. Polar Rose will even push information about the people in your 23 photos to your Facebook friends.

We’ve been happy to be the second photo sharing site to be featured on Polar Rose’s wonderful service; and this is only the first step. In the future we’re hoping to bring you even tighter integration on this new service.

If you didn’t have the pleasure of following the 23 server team on Twitter over the past hours, here’s the short version: 23 was offline for a few hours while we moved to brand-new hardware. Everything went pretty smoothly and we’re hoping this will make for a faster, more stable and just plain better 23.

Thank you for your patience over the past few hours.

We’ve been preparing to upgrade 23 to entirely new hardware for quite a while. Back in the summer of 2008 we took the first step towards this by moving the current server park to Denmark. Over the fall we’ve been assembling bits and pieces of the new set-up, and in November we took Visualblog live on the new hardware.

Finally, the time has come for 23!

The consequence is that we’ll be offline for a few hours on Sunday March 15th from about 16:00 in Copenhagen. That’s 3pm in London, 11am in New York, 8am in San Fransisco and in between in other assorted places.

This weekend we released some new features on 23, the biggest of which (literally) concerned the design of the photo pages. The other notabvle improvement in the go-around, however, was Twitter and microblog integration. You’ll find the control panel for these features under Options -> Status Updates. Using this panel you can connect to Twitter or to Ping.fm.

Now, here’s a short intro to microblogging with 23…

Posting automatic status updates
Over the past few months we’ve had short status updates listed in the header of user accounts. These messages are automatically generated from photos uploaded publicly, i.e. “Steffen has uploaded 7 photos to the album New York”. To have these messages posted to Twitter or any other connected microblog, simply set Auto-post 23 status to microblog to Yes when you connect the blog.

Now, whenever you upload a public batch of photos to 23, we’ll update your network with a suitable message and a short link back to the album, the tag or whatever.

Microblogging a photo with your own message
When you’ve set up Twitter or Ping.fm you’ll find a link to Microblog this photo in the sidebar next to every public photo. Click the link, write your message, and click the Update button. That’s all.

Posting photos to Twitter from your mobile phone
We’ve been allowing users to upload photos via email and then auto-blogging those incoming photos for a while now. This feature has been expanded to include microblogs as well: Simply send a photo and it’s caption to your secret email address and we’ll manage the distribution for you.

To set up this feature, first connect your 23 account to a microblog. Then browse to Settings for mail upload and add a new address. To complete the set-up click the Edit link, select Public and check the box next to Twitter and/or Ping.fm. After you’ve clicked the Save button you’ve got yourself a simple email-to-23-to-microblog chain.

But Twitter is *so* 2008 and I like (insert name here) better…
We thought you’d say that — which is why we’ve added support for Ping.fm. Ping.fm let’s you distribute your status updates to more than 30 social networks such as Facebook, Jaiku, Friendfeed, LinkedIn and Identi.ca. This means that you’ll never be limited to Twitter or any other altmodisch, over-crowded service.

When you’ve signed up for Ping.fm, simply connect 23 to Ping and then Ping to your favorite site — and you’re good to go.

That’s about it for now. We’ve been quite busy today building a tool which would fit perfectly on to this list, but we’ll keep that to ourselves for now. Until then, don’t forget to follow 23 on Twitter.

A little under two months ago we posted a lundry list of features we wanted to implement for a February Release of 23. And with more than five hours to spare, those features are now available on 23, The Large Edition.

Larger photos: The most notable new feature is the photo page which now sports more photo and less navigation. Large is great when you’re shooting hearts, beaches, fields, cars, boats, laundry, containers, selforganization, pizzas, or flowers.

Microblogging: 23 now connects either directly to Twitter or to any other microblogging service such as Jaiku, Friendfeed and Facebook through Ping.fm. We’ll be writing more about all the microblogging options over the next few days.

Even better album collections: We’ve added more cool stuff to the feature we introduced back in January. Most importantly you can now control the ordering of collections.

On a sadder note: We didn’t get password protected albums into this round of releases. That’ll wait for the next set of changes which we’ll also be writing about soon. Even without this there’s plenty of great new stuff to play with on 23…

Some of our servers have gone offline — and 23 is unreachable. We’re working to solve the problem as fast as possible.

Update: The system is online again. Downtime was about 45 minutes.

We’re suprised about how much attention the schwag post got. Funnily enough we quickly hit 23 emails. The email stream stagnated on 23 (coincidence?)… but then came more waves. Thanks.

As steffen commented we ordered more sticker in various sizes, for you guys. But when we recieved the stickers last week, the color was pale in comparison with the actual 23 logo color (#5D9C4B) and sadly they were also cut in the most random way. So… I’m sending them all back where they came from. Currently I’m hunting for a better printshop and I’ll be sending out some cool 23 stickers for 23 of you guys asap.

We’re a bootstrapped company and this is probably why you’re not seeing too much 23 schwag in the wild. No 23 caps, no 23 pens, no 23 mouse mats (we’ve got our name on pretty much every street in the world though)

We do have a few shirts and a few stickers laying around to share with y’all. So: the first twenty 23 people to write team@23visual.com with the subject “Schwag” will receive a batch of stickers. Include your address, and if you also give us your shirt size we’ll try to find a shirt for you as well.