Well while not quite a public release, coincidentally I did get an invite to Riya arrive in my mail box today. Much to my delight, after months of waiting, I finally get the chance to try out this new service. I have got to say that this is one of the new ‘Web 2.0′ services (for want of a much better expression) I have been most excited about, one service that could potentially be worthy of all the hype. Riya’s USP is in the facial and text recognition of photos and the ability to auto-tag what you upload.
Riya’s site is down for ‘maintenance’ and if rumours are to be believed they are about to have their grand opening. The evidence is stacking up, even Danny Yound is blogging about the how close they are to launching this potentially excellent service.
For those who don’t know Riya is a facial and text recognition service for your photo’s that could revolutionise photo sharing and tagging – I can’t wait!
Delicious has announced a beta rollout of private bookmarks called ‘Private Saving’. Simply go to your settings and enable the option by clicking on, you guessed it, ‘Private saving’. You will then find the option to make private when you next bookmark a page.
Apart from the obvious, i.e. hiding from people what you definitely shouldn’t be looking at, there are more legitimate reasons for people requesting this feature. For example, hiding logins to company intranets or networks, logins to CMS systems and personally I have always been hesitant to bookmark my banks and other financial institutions for fear of advertising this to the wrong people.
BitTorrent is the best distribution protocol available at the moment and deserves the positive credit it receives. Many distributions of Linux are available using BitTorrent along with other open source software and media such as video and podcasts. Valve the video game producer also hired Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent to help distribute patches and content for games. Many other companies are using the the system legitimately for distribution of their content in one form or another. Unfortunately due to its success it is perhaps now the number 1 protocol for illegal file sharing, and rightly or wrongly also receives a fair share of bad press.
I completely missed this one but for those of you that also don’t know, Songbird have released a minor update to their quality Firefox based music player (available here). This would appear to be a much more stable version and they have eliminated the problem with the player continuing to play after right clicking and closing from the taskbar. Updates include;
- Prefs page from mozilla with browser settings
- Some UI fixes
- M4A playback (oops)
- Faster metadata scanning
- More file types (flac/wav)
- Slurping through <embed>
