Disappointed in Today's News on Riya

About a year ago when Riya first launched with a big splash as a new Web 2.0 company with super exciting facial recognition software I was excited. I was super excited. Like a lot of people I uploaded a bunch of my photos to their site. I really liked their bulk uploader, found the site's navigation nice, and then proceeded to spend hours and hours and hours "training" Riya on the faces that I uploaded. The promise in Riya's technology for me was that by training Riya on some of my photos that Riya could then find other photos of mine of the same people and auto tag them for me. Since I take a *ton* of photos, this technology held particular promise. More than this though the technology that held the most promise to me was that of my training Riya on me, my family and friends, and then being able to use it to search the internet and find photos of me, my family and friends that I did not know existed. I was particularly excited about the idea of combining Riya's facial recognition technology with social networking at the time and sent a bunch of emails to Like.com and it's up right now and you can try it out. While I can appreciate that Riya had to come up with some kind of a business model to justify Munjal Shah. He says the jewlerey search alone takes 20GB of RAM. The problem is that I have no interest in doing jewelery searches. Scoble also says that Riya just couldn't get facial recognition software good enough to make it work. "Why not keep working on face detection? Because they learned through user testing that they'd never be able to make it good enough. They found that by focusing on visual image searches they can get a much more satisfied user base." And maybe this is the reason why a rumored Image Labeler game (that I'm not particularly fond of) and Yahoo with Flickr (which in my opinion is the best image search engine out today). Getty has some interesting search tools in the works which would hold promise to the extent that they have access to high quality image libraries. Ask and photos that have been people tagged with Thomas Hawk so far. Some of these are self portraits taken by me, others are photos of me taken by my friends and contacts. Over time this collection of images of me should grow and grow. I can also use SmartSets to filter photos further. If for instance I only want to see photos that Kristopher Tate and I are in together I can create a SmartSet of those images based on the people tags --Comments Tag: Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection and is also the Evangelist and CEO of the photo sharing site