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.

Tags: – – – –

Identity Issue at Riya

::HorsePigCow:: life uncommon: Me, Myself and I(dentity)

I was reading Tara’s post and Yes, I have the same issue with the existing identity structure at Riya Photo search service for now.

Just to give you all a bit of background, at the moment, Riya manages addresses for a user by his or her email address. It recognises the faces for a user and links that data to an account based on an email address. So now the problem is, one user can have more than one email address that he/she might give out to different users. He might give abc@xyz.com to one User A and User B might give xcv@asd.com email address for the same user. And User A and User B will use those email addresses respectively to recognise the person on Riya. Now the way I see from Tara’s post and using the system (Riya), I don’t think Riya at the moment understands that both different email addresses are of the same person (through face recognition) and merge the facial information about these person. If this was the case than when more pictures of the same User are uploaded on the site, it will take less time to train Riya to recognise the face of that person.

I think there should be a better way to identify the person and have a global identity no matter how many email addreses he/she might is recognised by. Here is what I think can be done (this is all based on the information I got about Riya): –

  • We should have a system in place like Plaxo Contact Management system
  • Initially people can register users by different email address. If it is the same email address than I assume that the problem should be solved
  • So now the situation is that for a given user “A” we have many pictures uploaded on the system and is recognised by different email addresses
  • So now when the user “A” registers himself on Riya.com , he or she should be given an option of registering all his email addresses
  • Riya than understands that all the data for the different email addresses is of the same person and merges it together
  • I think the problem is solved

OR

  • Riya becomes smart enough to understand that all the data even though stored under different email addresses are of the same person using face recognition technology and merge them together.

The other issue I am facing is when I want to put a name to the face in Riya I have to put an email address for that person. 

Media_httpwwwsoftware_janbx

Media_httpwwwsoftware_wfqog

 Now as indentified by many others, I might not have an email address for that person or that person might not even have an email address. This is no joke, my uncles and aunties living in remote areas in India don’t know what computers are, how are they  

supposed to have an email address. What should I do about them? I just don’t want to keep on putting fake email addresses for them. But I still want the system to recognise them by their faces! I might go to Geek Dinners, meet people there, take pictures but might not have their email address. But I still want the system to recognise them by their names. So there should be a better alternative to this. Ofcourse I can tag those pictures by the name of the person or something similar, but than this does not solve by purpose. I will have to keep on doing this every time I upload pictures as the system would not recognise the pictures of that person.

 

Media_httpwwwsoftware_iytzp

How about also allowing to recognise the pictures by a group? I might be going out with 100 people quite a few times but don’t want to bother myself recognising all the pictures all the time, but I have created a group for those 100 people. I just might want to add them by groups. So if there are more than certain amount of people in the same group, the photo is automatically recognised as that group. Of course again, I can tag those pictures by group name, but might not solve the problem.

More suggestions coming up soon.

 

Tags: – – –

Welcome to Softwareandtools.com / I am not gone

Hello All,
I just wanted to let you know that I am not gone. I am here busy with my personal life. My parents are here from India for a well deserved vacation. So having a good time with them and this is supposed to last for nearly a month.

But in the mean while there was one project that was going on in my mind for a while and it came out in the form on a new site called Softwareandtools.com . Software And Tools is a site for software and tool reviews. We will be also be discussing about Windows OS. We are planning to do demo video of new software and tools along with podcasts in the future. So wish us Good luck. I will be talking more on this in the coming weeks. Mind you, I will still be blogging here.

Earlier I was waiting to perfect the skins and templates for the new site, but then I realised that I will just start with what I have instead of delaying the whole project. I am no programmer, so have very limited web development knowledge. But if anybody is interested in offering some help and showing their expertise than please let me know. My email address is on the left hand side of the blog.

I also want to invite writers for the new site. So please visit http://www.softwareandtools.com site and see if you are interested in writing for the various blogs on that site.

Software And Tools is a work in progress for now, so please be patient for the time being.