Riya, the media darling of the Web 2.0 community, is opening up their service to people who signed up during alpha. Rumor has it that they will be opening for the public later this week. I’ll probably be uploading some photos tonight.
The biggest question in my mind is how much time and effort is needed by the user to bring Riya’s image recognition software up to speed? And secondly, how will the difficulty level change in response to wildly different photo collections?
In addition, the sheer processing power needed by most intelligent image processing algorithms can be large. I’m sure that when they open up their service, the whole population of digg and slashdot will be wanting to parse their photos. I hope their servers don’t melt.
In the mean time, has anyone tried out the latest version of Riya, which was opened today? I’d be curious to find out your experiences.