SeanMcb.com

So, Alpha 2 of Riya went up yesterday, according to a post in the CEO’s blog. New features include:

• Open public searching
• Firefox support

Wow, let me see. Yes, that’s everything on my previous list of concerns! Now that’s what I call a fast turn-around time for development. (I’m only kidding. I’m not deluding myself into thinking that they developed Firefox support because of me.) Unfortunately, due to (what is probably) high traffic and the alpha state of the software, there still appear to be a few bugs. I haven’t played around with the service much yet (I don’t think I made it into the second group of alpha testers), but I did manage to get one search to return results. I did a search for “Tara Hunt”, who I knew would have photos uploaded to the service, and I got results. 24 to be exact. I browsed through the results a bit and verified that it was recognizing and tagging faces and text (which it was). After that, I couldn’t get any other searches to work, but that’s probably a result of some bugs that are still being worked out of the system.

This is still very early in the service’s life cycle. They’re not even to beta, for goodness sake. However, I’ve already seen proof of concept that their technology is working (unless they faked all of the results, which is unlikely). My jaw-drop moment will be when I upload my own photos, identify my face in a couple of shots, and then verify that it has identified me in the rest of my photos (wearing hats, different glasses, etc). That’s when I’ll really know it’s working. I’ll probably have to wait for the beta though.

EDIT: Anyone wanting to hear more about Riya and its philosophy, business model, and privacy implications can listen to this interview with Tara Hunt.