Use facial recognition technology to bookmark the web pages that entertain you most

Smile Suggest is a new Google Chrome extension that uses your webcam to track your facial movements, picking up on smiles and saving the content that caused them.  Advert writer and digital designer Martin McAllister, created the extension with no commercial aspirations, for this to happen the program would have to make recommendations. Instead, McAllister says the project is more a remark about the flippancy of ‘Like’ culture. Smile Suggest logs what you smile at and then gives you the option to share.

“A like or a share is generally (on some level) seen as endorsing and lending one's name to a thing,” says Mcallister. “I think Smile Suggest asks a nice question about the comparison of a Facebook Like, a Twitter favourite and a genuine smile.”

Facial recognition technology can often have negative Orwellian connotations but a number of artists are using it as a tool for good. So far we’ve seen a TV that only works when you smile, a book that won’t open if you do, and a theatre that charges you per laugh.