Demo 06: Riya Wows
I’ve been singing Riya’s praises since I first got a chance to try out the service on the first run of alpha testing. In fact, I love Riya so much, I started a fan blog dedicated solely to the service and the people bringing it to us.
If you don’t know what Riya is, then I’ll sum it up for you. It’s facial recognition software that works through your web browser. At its most basic form, you can train Riya to recognize people in your photos, and then it does a pretty remarkable job of learning and identifying that same person in future photos you may upload. It’s one of the cooler web apps I’ve seen, ever, and it might also turn out to be one of the most useful.
Riya is more than just facial recognition tech. It combines the power of social networking with the facial recognition. In essence, I can get on Riya, search for my name, and see all pictures that not only I have taken, but photos of me that others have uploaded. It goes even deeper than that, however. When you’re training the software to recognize a face, you have a chance to attach an email address to that face. By doing so, you’re creating a virtual address book of sorts, with an actual face to go alone with the name. Let’s say I take a picture of Tara (which I haven’t, because sadly I’ve never met her outside of online correspondence). Others have already trained Riya to recognize Tara, so when I upload that photo I’ve taken of her, the system already recognizes her and adds her contact information to my address book.
I’ve been using Riya for a few months now, and through the growing pains that are experienced with any application of this site, Riya has shown promise. Riya wants to be THE brand for photosearch, which is a relatively new concept outside of the tagging available within Flickr. And see, part of me wishes that Riya would stay independent and become as big of a name as Flickr. It’s a different application, to be sure, but they can definitely own the social photosearch market. Hell, they are creating the market as we speak. But something tells me that despite the Google buyout rumors from a few months back, Riya will be sold for a significant sum to a pretty big player.
My preference? Yahoo. I want the Riya technology incorporated into Flickr. With that addition, Flickr will not only cement itself as the only true destination for anything related to photos, but it will firmly plant itself as the dominant force in photos for the foreseeable future.
