Received last night my invitation to beta test Riya. I had previously posted on this project, but had to give up on alpha testing because I'm on FFox. It was good I registered right away, as they seem to be facing a lot of enthusiasm and perhaps find it a little difficult to cope with the traffic.

Anyway, uploading about a year worth' of pics every night. Definitely some quirks to be ironed out, esp in the UI - also not sure how to make it work behind a proxy (can't get the Uploader to work when I'm in the offices, but works OK at home). And speaking of the uploader, there is a misleading name for cripes' sake ! It does much more than just uploading, actually does a lot of preliminary image processing, but probably not the pattern matching.

Interesting technology, undoubtely with some interesting applications e.g. in the security business (imagine running hours of survcam tapes through a Riya on steroids to identify faces of suspects, or scanning whole stadiums looking for bad guys).

AND it will give Flick'r a run for their money. Always good.