I finally got the chance to play around with Riya, the new social facial recognizer system. There were quite a few quirks, most of which can easily be forgiven since it’s in early beta.
The uploader didn’t work on my computer at home. My machine is a bit old (a 1GHz machine from 2000), but I haven’t had much trouble running other modern applications. The uploader would grind and say everything was successfully uploaded, when in fact, no pictures were uploaded.
The core functionality is definitely there. The facial recognition is fairly accurate, and I got the faces in my albums detected without too much trouble. There were about five false positives where a face was detected in an object that wasn’t a face. Given that a fair amount of faces were discovered, the false positives weren’t too annoying.
I really like the point and click interface–it makes it easy to tag single and multiple faces with people’s names. It’s still buggy, but once they get it worked out, Riya will be a valuable tool in organizing pictures. It’s really stunning how organized your albums become when metadata about people’s presence in photos are inserted. It makes it really easy to surf through and find the photos you’re looking for. In fact, I would be big fan of a desktop version of Riya that I could use offline.
Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, and all the rest better perk their ears up if Riya gets big. It would be wise of them to try to get Riya’s technology licensed to them (if Riya will even consider that), because metadata about people in a picture is valuable. For these types of social services involving pictures, it might well be one of those technologies that creates a significant paradigm shift in the way people use photos to connect to others.