Tara just released the bad news: the Uploader for Macs won’t be ready for the next Alpha release.

Trust me — it’s worth waiting.  Better to get an Uploader that’s already stable than to have them rush something out to you that doesn’t work.

I’m not sure if the Riya team has made any drastic upgrades to the servers that host them, but Riya is significantly faster now than it was even two weeks ago.  Tara has promised that there’s some cool stuff coming down the pipe for the next alpha release, and I’m guessing that some of that venture capital money went to upgrading the servers and putting a big, fat pipe behind this thing.  Good call, team.

I’m not sure if they’re going to keep the Alpha tag when they release the unrestricted demo at DEMO next month, or if they’re going to move it into beta status.  Personally, I’m growing tired of seeing new services have “COOL NEW SERVICE” and then “beta” in small caps in the logo.  It was cool at first, but now it seems more like the trendy thing to do instead of an actual project status.  For example, how in the WORLD is Flickr STILL in beta?  You’d think that a service that’s been around for two years AND been purchased by Yahoo would be able to move past the beta stage at some point.  I’d caution the Riya team to not fall into that trap; they should keep an unrestricted alpha series open to the public while also undergoing true beta testing with a core team, and when it’s ready, release version 1.0 to the public.  At that point in time, I think people are going to be as sick of seeing “beta” attached to everything as I am and would much rather see “version 1″ than another Web 2.0 service desperately trying to look like everything else that’s popular.  I know I’d be much more forgiving of a product if you didn’t have “beta” attached to your app, because beta doesn’t really mean beta anymore — it’s just the trendy thing to do.

- In case you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard the news, I wanted to point out that Riya raised 15 million dollars in venture capital financing yesterday from Bay Partners.  They’re really doing some excellent things at Riya HQ, and I’m glad they were able to secure financing.  In my own dealings with venture capitalists, I find that it’s extremely important for a VC firm you choose to work with to closely mesh with the capabilities and vision of your company, or else it’ll be disaster in the making.  Munjal seems very excited about Bay Partners and the team he’s working with, and I applaud them for finding the right partner who won’t jump and sell out before the product is even ready for delivery.  Riya has the ability to become, five years down the line, one of the most-used web apps out there, and this investment will help them move the company forward as they legitimize photo search.

- The team is still preparing to release the unrestricted alpha of Riya at the Demo conference next month.  As most of you know, you have to score an invitation to use the service now, but once it’s released at Demo anyone will be able to sign up and test the service.  I think that’ll be a watershed moment for the team, because they’re going to have to handle huge numbers of users all at once, and it’ll be interesting to see how the app holds up.  Not saying that it won’t, not even speculating, because if there’s one thing I know about Riya, it’s that they are committed to delivering a top-notch product, even to the minimal amount of alpha testers using it right now.

Tara says that they’re getting ready to roll out some cool new features.  The main release is a new Riya Uploader tool with bugfixes and an auto-update feature to make sure you always have the latest version of the software.  They also need help with the facial-recognition algorithms, so they’re asking for people with more than 1000 photos to help test.  In return, they’ll pay you on a ascending scale or give you a new digital camera, whichever you prefer.  I wish I had access to all my photos, because I’d upload all of them just to get a new camera.  As it stands, I’ve only got access to about 500 of my photos, at least until I can get the rest of them off of the hard drive they’re currently stored on.  Oh, and you also need to be able to provide all the photos on a DVD and tag them correctly.

Enric sent me a link to a great little film clip that he cobbled together from footage taken at the TechCrunch meetup, where Riya was officially launched.  It’s got a veritable who’s who of the internet community featured, and you learn some really cool background info on the Riya concept and how some of it is going to work in the future.  Highly recommended for anyone who might be interested in delving more into the Riya background/technical aspect of things.  Also a brilliant idea from Robert Scoble that SOMEONE is going to capitalize on sooner rather than later.

I’m getting ready to upload about 300 more photos, mostly of people I don’t even know.  They’re from my Advanced Individual Training when I first joined the Army; the course was sixteen weeks long and only took place three years ago, but I can’t for the life of me remember most of their names.  I’m hoping that others in Riya will eventually tag photos of these people and attach the same email address that I have for them, which means I’ll be able to see their names.  I never thought about it before, but I suppose this could be a pretty cool function of Riya in the future.

Finally got the uploader to work today, and uploaded about twenty more photos.  I wanted to test the system a bit, so I uploaded ten pictures of people that I’d already tagged and identified and ten pictures of people who were unknown.  I ended up with eleven pictures of people that Riya identified somehow, so I went in to check and see who had been mis-tagged.  Sure enough, a picture of my girlfriend’s sister had been tagged with my girlfriend’s name.  Does this mean that Riya will have a tough time telling the difference between family members?  I doubt it — I put up bunches of pictures of myself and my sisters and it was able to tell the difference between them every time.  This might have been a strange occurence, and a singular one at that.

Tara  has a post up asking for more ideas for the photosearch, so here’s your chance to get your voice heard!  Is there anything that YOU would personally like to see in a photosearch?  I like the idea of a location-based search, like finding all photos that were taken at a particular place I’m planning on taking a vacation to, or things like that, but it seems like Tara already has that idea nailed down.

Had a great exhange with Munjal Shah today.  He responded personally to my critique of finding broken images in my email, and narrowed down the problem to Jeremy Is An Idiot.  I hadn’t turned off the image filtering in my Gmail, so all images from the Riya image server were showing up as broken, when in fact they were not — they were just being filtered out.  We still haven’t figured out why there were broken images on the actual Riya site itself for a brief time this afternoon, but it seems to be working fine now.

I’m loading a second batch of photos right now; or I should at least say I’m “trying” to load a second batch right now.  The uploader has been stuck on “Totals Photos Uploaded: 0″ for about twenty minutes.  Might it have something to do with the fact that I tried to upload photos from a location outside of my pictures folder?  I doubt that’s it, but it’s the only thing I changed as far as I know.

I will say that the software has done an incredible job recognizing the people that ARE in my photos, especially given the minimal amount of training I have given it thus far.

I uploaded a pretty large set of photos to the RIya alpha. They say it works better if you have 1,000 photos, but I don’t have that many stored on my computer right now, so I uploaded everything I could. The process took about 45 minutes, and then the server emailed me at my registered account to let me know it was done uploading. It’s supposed to show you a list of faces that the software has recognized that need tagging, but all I got was broken image links. I expect quite a bit of that; Tara made sure to let all of us testers know that the software was in “soalphaithurts” phase, but also stressed the importance of leaving feedback for the team so they can grow out of these rough spots.

I logged in to the software and started adding tags to faces. It instantly grouped together five of my pictures of Abbey, mostly because those were the shots with the best frontal picture. Riya definitely works better when the subject is facing towards the camera, but it *does* work in other situations too. It instantly made me about ten more groups of people, and I spent 10 minutes tagging everyone. The software is amazingly easy to use and runs quite smooth on my Firefox-assisted laptop here. Granted, I’ve got a cable modem all to myself, but this thing is humming along quite nicely.

After naming all my Riya-recognized people, I went through and started manually tagging people. While you’re doing this, the software is still “learning” people and their faces, so it might go ahead of you and recognize someone that you would have otherwise had to tag manually.

I’m going to download all my Flickr photos and add them to Riya tonight at some point. Right now, I’m duly impressed with what I’ve seen, even with the broken image links.

Tags: Riya, Photosearch, riyarocks

The initial Riya alpha release is now out.  I’m installing the uploader on my machine and will then start uploading all my photos; I hope to have some more thoughts about the system later tonight.

I’ve been doing some thinking about what a service like Riya could potentially be worth to companies like Google, Yahoo or even Microsoft.  Most of us have heard the rumors that Google is offering to buy out Riya for $40 million, and that seems like an astronomical number.  It’s just a rumor, of course, so please don’t take my words as anything but that.  If you stop and think about it, though, you start to realize that to someone like Microsoft, Riya could be worth a whole lot more.  The possibilities of including Riya’s technology in Windows Vista boggles the mind; can you imagine having facial recognition software right out of the box?  I’d wager that the real price of Riya, if they do sell the property eventually, will be somewhere above $200 million, and that’s a bare minimum.  We could see a bidding war escalate, especially if Google decides that THEY would like to include something like Riya in this oft-rumored web-based OS they’re supposedly buildilng.

Thank you to all the folks from Riya who’ve linked me from the official Riya blog and your personal blogs.  I hope it comes through that I’m a geniune fan and can’t wait to try this software out!