There's very little gray area on this one: You're either completely excited by the potential for built-in facial recognition combined with smartphones and social networks, or your entirely creeped out and afraid for the future of the planet.

The future is nearly here and I, for one, welcome our new overlords, who today come to us in the form of a Silicon Valley company called Viewdle that we first wrote about last October. Read on to find out how they plan to make what you see above a reality.

Last October, Viewdle raised $10 million and told us that it's primary function would be to assist with tagging photos on smartphones before they're even uploaded to sites like Facebook, that way they wouldn't get lost in the cloud. Today, however, Austin-based PSFK Salon writes that the company was out and about at the Mobile World Congress showing off a much deeper integration, wherein its visual analysis technology is used to link faces with social media.

Viewdle sits between the camera and the user analysing faces in the camera stream, identifying them, then offering links to Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms. A user can identify and tag people in pictures & videos then pass the information to their social networks. As they tag others the software learns to recognize them, and can even share these new visual profiles with other users. The live view also offers an augmented reality tagging overlay that reveals information about the people around you.

According to Viewdle's website, a number of implementations are on the way, from ViewdleFaces to ViewdlePlaces to ViewdleGames. For now, however, Viewdle Uploader - a desktop program - is the only thing available. Its mobile apps, which it says are coming soon, stand apart from other recognition programs with one big distinction. They do all of the facial recognition procession locally, on the device, instead of outsourcing that functionality to the cloud.

What do you say? Are you stoked or completely creeped out? I know that I could use a little help once in a while and certainly wouldn't mind if a smartphone app could help me out. Maybe we're friends on Twitter already, but I'm blanking on a name or a context. Would it be so bad if I pointed my phone across the room and figured it out?

Fine. For now, I'll suffer in peace, wander over and admit that, once again, I have forgotten your name.

Portable Identity

Identity and portable identity/data remain hot topics. Luckily, the conference wasn't just another pointless "200x is the year of OpenID" love-fest. There were sessions on OAuth, MySpaceID, and Facebook Connect. At one of the Facebook Garage sessions, Dave Morin dug into the nitty gritty of Facebook Connect and really impressed. OpenID and OAuth remain medium-term goals for many web apps, while Connect has jumped immediately to the front on their development road map. This goes to the core vibe of Le Web 2008, which was all about business benefit.

Improved Search

Despite having nothing earth-shattering to say, Marissa Meyer of Google still captured the attention of the audience. Led by some excellent questions, she covered topics such as temporal search (which gives only results from a certain time period), personal search (if the search engine knows what you searched for and liked before, it can give you better results next time), and local search. Meyer noted that she thinks local search in particular will be a hot feature for 2009. There are many start-ups trying to crack this particular nut, but one can see from Google Maps, and more specifically the latest versions of Google Maps Mobile, that these start-ups should be very afraid and need to create something far better than a Google Maps mashup to succeed.

Cloud Storage

Cloud computing and storage is becoming more mainstream every day. There was nothing particularly new from Werner Vogels at Le Web apart from news that EC2 is now fully available in Europe. Amazon's offerings remain geared more to infrastructure, relying on others, such as PutPlace, JungleDisk, and RightScale, to deliver storage that is easily accessible. This is why people have been paying attention to Microsoft's current direction. Every Live product put out by Microsoft in the past two years has been bettered by the competition. There is one clear exception to this: Live Mesh. This is the first consumer-facing Microsoft web app that nails it. At my home we have it installed on four machines and have a directory tree on each syncing seamlessly no matter where we are. Who needs a home server or home network-attached storage (NAS) when Live Mesh does it all without you having to think?

Video Search

Didier Lombard, the head of France Telecom/Orange, said that the next big thing would be "video search," which initially sounded laughable. Then Google confirmed that it has been studying it for a long time, and then we found out that the start-up competition winner was Viewdle, which does exactly that. Viewdle's reps gave a fantastic overview of the technology, which of course spooked many when it was pointed out that it was originally developed for military applications. Being able to parse faces in video and associate them with specific people is mind-blowing. With $500 dual-core boxes, they can parse in nearly real-time, and with massively parallel NVidia GPUs, they can go far beyond that. Expect an exit here in 2009.

Business as usual

Much of the rest of Le Web was about business (and love!), with many presentations by successful web companies that aren't particularly technically innovative. From travel review websites to website builders to mobile IM, we've seen these before. The difference now is that many of these businesses are making money. Let's hope that 2009 shows more progress in both business and technology.

This was a guest post by Conor O'Neill, CEO, LouderVoice; conference photos courtesy of Flickr.