Riya Alpha 2 inbound

Recognizing Deven: Alpha 2 inbound

 Munjal posts about the Alpha release 2 of Riya. I am happy with the fixes. The most important ones for me are the following points:-

 b) Make it work with Firefox - Done - nuff said

c) Don't make email required when I train Riya on a new person - Done

d) The uploader install was confusing and didn't work right. I think we fixed this by making our uploader more explicit (that you are down loading something) and putting the settings for which directory you upload only in the uploader (we had it in two places which was confusing).

e) Many of you didn't like that we locked you out of your account until the upload was complete. Now that is fixed

The uploader sucked big time. I only wish that it would not take the same amount of RAM and processing power this time. As normal users would not prefer to keep their systems running over night and client consuming more than 50% of processor power is still not acceptable. Lucky I got 2 GB RAM on my computer, how many users do you think will have that kind of RAM installed on their home systems? If the client really needs these kind of resources, what I suggest is you have a mechanism where I can instruct the client to run in low priority when I am using the computer and then crab the resources of my computer in full swing when I am not using it (in other words idle time). Copernic Desktop Tool does this very well.

It’s good that now we won’t be required to enter an email address of the person the first time we are making him recognised to the system (adding his/her face to the system).

Riya had tag clouds for both albums and people before and Munjal mentions in this post that they have removed tag clouds for albums. Ya, I agree that it was too confusing. But how about implementing a feature where people can switch to tag clouds or list mode as per their preference (similar to what del.icio.us has done)?

I hope their new uploader lets me upload photos from my DVD drive or from over a network share this time.

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Is Riya selling itself to Google?

Om Malik : » Google's Riya Designs?

Media_httpwwwriyacomi_uzgaj

Boy, I was just checking last minute news on Memeorandum before going to bed when I saw Om Malik’s post about the rumor that Google might buy out Riya. This was 10 second shock and anxiety to me as I kept on reading further. Why you ask? As an user I am close to Riya & team involved than most of you are. I have been alpha testing Riya (yes, it’s still in Alpha) but it’s good for what it does.

Now Google is cool and all and I use it extensively but would hate to see in a good way that Google will own this good product as well. Why doesn’t Google concentrate on improving their existing products and bringing them out of Beta first! But I can see a overall better product if Google buys Riya out and integrates it with their existing photo related products like Picasa and all.

But Riya is a cool product with a good future. I am not really surprised if many companies are behind it, but did not think that it will be this fast (remember, it’s still in Alpha, even their launch party is on this Friday at TechCrunch). Good luck Munjal Shah and team.

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Official Google Blog: First Base

Official Google Blog: First Base

Found from Google Blog that they have launched Google Base. Michael Arrington has his views on this (doesn’t look like he is impressed a lot) . I have done a quick check here on Software And Tools site. I added some labels in my test and a label of ‘Software’ brings me http://base.google.com/base/search?a_n196=Software&a_y196=0&a_s196=0&a_r=1 result.  I will write more about this when I try more. 

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Online Tag Generator

Online Tag Generator

I got to admit, when tags came out and started to become a buzz word, I thought it was a fadd that was going to go away. As I started to understand it more and more and started to use it, I knew that this was something that is going to stay here for a while. I find it very useful now since I have started using Del.icio.us.

Now coming back to tool in discussion, I found a online Tag Generator using which we can create tags for Technorati, Del.icio.us, Flickr & Furl. I also found a bookmarklet that can be used in Firefox (remember to use ‘commas’ after each tag).

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Another site where we will see face recognition

[link] Riya - Photo search with face recognition

While surfing the net today, I came to a comment made on http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2005/10/24/428265.aspx post. The comment was made by Vikram and he says that they are working on a product that will do face recognition as well and the site is called http://www.myheritage.com . Vikram, I could not see any demo on the site.

Is the beta by invitation only?

 

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