Emergintex

I started uploading some more pictures tonite to Riya. The first question that I asked myself was:

‘Does Riya upload the full sized images?’

This could be a severe bottleneck in the uploader part of the service. At the moment, if it does upload full sized images, then I do not see any reason to do so, because users do not see the full sized image on the web side anyways. If this is required for the image recognition algos to work more efficiently, then there needs to be some trade-off setting which the user can tweak. I tried downloading a photograph from the web site, and it came back as a resized version. So, not sure about what size is uploaded. Would be good if someone from Riya can leave a comment on this one.

My first review on Alpha II is here.

Technorati tags: riya,soalphaithurts,riyarocks

An awesome implementation of a simple idea. Gtalkr is a Flash based web client to Google Talk. Meebo kinda pounced on the idea of getting your IM clients online, removing the hassles of maintaining different IM clients on your desktop and allowing you to move the clients to the web, so that you can get online on your favourite IM from anywhere, any desktop.

Gtalkr, extends the same concept but in a neat slick Flash implementation. There had been Flash clients for Gtalk in past, but Gtalkr beats them all. Once you log in using your GMail account, Gtalkr brings in your contacts (added in Google Talk), and also your address book from GMail. You can open chat window by clicking on any of the contacts.

Apart from the regular features Gtalkr provides Extension APIs to let you write extensions to Gtalkr framework.

Gtalkr exposes a simple and easy to use Extension API allowing you to embed any Flash and even Flex content in Gtalkr.

The UI looks slick with a totally user friendly experience. You can ‘run’ any extension that you have available. By default there is a Yahoo Maps (beta) extension available, which can be used to readily locate someone without leaving your current window, which is a nice add-on.

The chat inbox feature lets you see your past chats, which are stored here by contact names, which can be selected to see the entire chat history. These chats can also be tagged (& searched later on) and ’starred’ as in GMail.

‘Buddy pouce’ extension lets you drag and drop contacts onto the extension window, so that whenever the contacts in this list get online, you get an alert. You can also get alerts for new incoming emails on your GMail account.

I have been playing with it for past 30 mins, and so far havent got into any user experience turn offs.

Technorati tags: Gtalkr,GTalk.

Thanks to Tara Hunt I was able to get into the Alpha II of Riya, a photo searching/recognition service.

The alpha registration is simple. Just follow the link, and get the Riya uploader tool. As mentioned that the uploading is a slow time consuming process, it certainly is true. So I just started off with a small set of photos (< 100, to just see what I get). It looked like that the 'Start upload' actually launches a javaw.exe process and connects to the photo uploading site (where your photos get pushed). This is certainly a memory hogging process (where I saw around 40 threads increased everytime I started upload). Not sure what else the uploader does (apart from sending a acknowledge to a mailer when upload is finished, so you can get a mail back), but since my set was small, it was done in under 1 hour.

Once the photos were halfway uploading, I logged onto the Riya.com site and saw an album come up with my photos coming in. One of the best first user experiences in a long time, I saw small rectangles around the faces in my photos. What do most of the photos have? People. Faces. Riya does a good job in finding faces (and recognizing them to some level). Though sometimes I also gave me a small rectangle (like the ones for a face) on some parts of the photo, where there was no face. These areas instead had artifacts which the software might confuse with eyes (necklaces kinda things).

Once you have started afresh, Riya will allow you to train it by using the drop down around the faces and adding names to the faces. The more you do this, more trained the service will be to recognize this person in future. I did train for a couple of people in couple of photos, and immediately started to see Riya recognizing to some extent. This was low in my case, as I skipped on training to the limit. I was skimming on the training part...to see more action.

Once you go back to the home page under your login, you can see the thumbnail representation of the images in your album(s). I must say that the thumbnails were not of a good quality, this might be due to the scaling on the browser side. Below the thumbnails you can see the name of people (in your photos) and a number (denoting the # of occurences a person was recognized). Clicking on a number you can see all the photos of that person, which could be neat once you have achieved maximum recognition of your photo library.

One pain point in training was as you start adding people, the drop down above the faces becomes long, and you have to scroll a lot to tag an existing name. Also once the layer of names shows up, there is no way to toggle this layer off, which becomes irritating after some time. The only way to close this layer is by clicking the dropdown itself again, which is normal windows behaviour, but if you have moved your mouse over to some other portion of the image (with the contacts layer showing), you have lost the drop down itself. Hope the team understands what I am saying here.

You can manually tag the photos from a bottom control bar, which appears when you mouse-over an photo. I noticed 2 small issues here.

1.Once you type in a tag, and click add, the textbox doesnt clear itself. You need to manually delete the text to add new tag.
2.I could not get a way to delete a tag, that was added from the bottom control bar.

You can manually tag objects / text in an photograph. This can be done by dragging a selection rectangle around the object/text to tag, and then name that selection. This could be used for frequently appearing text/objects in your photo library.

Given the alpha state, I was impressed by the recognition capability. At the same time given the apha state, I hope the user experience would go up in coming releases. The thumbnail quality is low to poor.

Technorati tags: riya,soalphaithurts,riyarocks

A short post on how Chicago is changing the technology scene. Some startups are showing up on the map of Chicago, which are doing a good job on the ethernet.

Companies like Feedburner & 37Signals are doing a good job in their own domains. Recently David Heinemeier Hansson (of Ruby On Rails framework) landed in Chicago. He is a partner in 37Signals and released rONr after working on the framework while developing Basecamp, Backpack etc…

Lets see what more does Chi town do to change the ethernet landscape.

With the current wave of Web2.0, we have seen thores of products coming up. Most of them arent able to get to most of the users and get buried under the wave itself (other products shadowing them…). The ones which are able to get attention of the users, are lucky and also need to maintain that exposure in order to not get buried under the wave.
Recently I have been following the launch of couple of such products. All of them have followed different strategies from release point of view.
In order of ease (from the users point of view), my choices are:

1. Meebo. Meebo team did 2 great things. First they took an existing technology and delievered it in a beautiful way. Second was their release cycles. Awesome work by the team again in keeping the users informed, and even taking the ‘demo-or-die’ attitude to the end users. They uploaded release after release in short period of a week even, and incoporating the user feedback as they went ahead. First thing they get here is the ’shock-and-awe’ of the user. They went live in a very short period once the news was out. They for sure had a private release for friends and family initially, but it was well guarded. Once the news was out, the site was live. This way the initial impact on the users was cashed in, and I am sure most of the first time users became regular users. Once the ball was rolling, it went into a continuous feedback. More feedback from the users prompted more frequent and bug-free releases.
2. Morfik. As opposed to the release process Meebo went through, Morfik guys decided to launch at Web 2.0. They carried along a real life application demo, created using Morfik technology. This is good. If you arent ready to let users get their hands wet with your technology, you atleast show them an application or two, so that they can grasp the idea in a concrete way and relate back to something that they do. Once out of the launch date, Morfik posted a nice timeline of further releases of stuff that would lead to final release of the AppBuilder itself. This is nice, you dont let the users go away, and instead keep information flowing in packets. Then the Morfik Pioneer Programe was launched and also the Morfik forums was created and released to public. Another application built using Morfik technology. User still stick around and are getting eager and eager to see the real stuff. One thing for sure, very less people are lost in this process.
3. Riya. Team at Riya is playing with a nice technology. They are getting nice press ( best in all 3 discussed here). Are they creating more users (who will return)? Not sure. I didnt want to say that, but this just came to my mind. Right now the numbers are around 25 Alpha-I testers. Another 1000 for Alpha-II by early tommorow, and another ~6300 for a later release based on how the Alpha-II goes. These are big numbers, but are they sustainable numbers? I dont see anything wrong in the technology. Its the release cycle that I am worried of. Riya had been there for some time now. Most of the people get turned off when they hear so much about the product around the ethernet, but still see no way to try the product. What Morfik guys did at this point, was that they released a video of the product being driven to create a demo application. I havent seen much at Riya.com outside the static screen shots posted in the tour. Once the users stick around for a 7-10 days to get his/her hands wet, and dont hear much about it, I am not sure when and will they come back again. I can be easily wrong here (after the Google-Riya rumour though). I am sure guys at Riya are doing the best and being careful about how much they open up the pipeline, given the resource hungry application we are dealing with.

Technorati tags: Riya,Morfik,Meebo

No updates on the Riya launch party that was supposed to happen at Michael Arrington’s home?

I am sure the hot question that everyone would have for Munjal Shah would be regarding the rumored aquisition. Munjal had’nt been updating on the his blog lately regarding the product though, so not sure what signals one would pick up from that.

I hope Michael posts something in the morning, meanwhile I found this interesting snap from Niall Kennedy’s flickr stream:

Hmmm is that someone monkeying around with the ‘merger’ or is that a real merger !

Technorati tags: Riya,Google.

Update: Om Malik updates that the tentative confirmation of the deal is at $40M

This is (or should I say was) expected. Google showing its interests in Riya, for the tunes of $40-60M. There is a lot of talk on the blogosphere (Om, Niall, Paul) today about Google aquiring Riya. None has been confirmed by either of the sides to the moment.

Opportunities: Google already has a nice user base in the picture management domain by virute of Picasa. Riya would be a nice add-on on top of Picasa’s current capabilities. Picasa’s Timeline functionality can nicely use Riya’s search technology to provide a new and improved Timeline for a particular tag from your picture collection.

Riya has been gathering a huge fan base since Munjal started posting up-to-date status on his blog. The team has been doing long hours to get out the alpha, though I didnt hear much about the first wave of alpha invites. Was there ever a second wave of alpha invites? Not sure. It seemed that the first alpha testers gave a lot of feedback to stall the second group of invites (just my guess though).

Google on the other hand might look at this as another aquisition opportunity in its current aquisition mode. Given the feedback its getting for Picasa, this could be a wise investment. Also looking at the way Google is providing server-space and bandwidth in terms of GMail and Google Base, this would be a no brainer for Google to integrate Riya’s services within its existing services.

Technorati tags: Riya,Google.

Ok, I am seeing data in my reports now. One thing that is missing though from the initial launch of Google Analytics is the Site Overlay report.

The above is a screenshot of the site overlay report, which basically showed your site inside of a frame, with all the links being tagged by Google Analytics with extra information/metadata on that particular link (like Click throughs etc.).

I guess that Site overlay was causing some wierd layout issues to the web sites while rendering it inside the frame, and it was (maybe) having problems analysing sites with greater number of links.

Technorati tags: analytics,Google,statistics,SiteOverlay,Site Overlay

Google. Google Analytics. One more feather in the hat for Google. Analytics is a perfect wrap-up on AdSense and AdWords after Google aquired Urchin (now redirects to Google Analytics) in March. Its a wrap up in style. Starting as a paid service Goolgle first lowered the fees, and now its totally free (almost). Analytics aims at providing you will all the information you want to see about your web site performance, top clicked links, identify the links which are there & you thought are nice to haves but now you know that hardly anyone clicks through it.

Registration and hook-up is simple. Best part is the reporting. Reports start with a ‘Executinve Sumamry’ which in a single dashboard lets you know 4 major datapoints: Total # of visits, # of first time visits & returning visits, cities from where you recieve maximum traffic & your top referral sources.

The dashboard itself is presented in Flash, so UI is slick and neat, complete with a world map to show top cities providing maximum traffic to your site. Apart from the Executive dashboard, you have options to view Conversion Summary, Marketing Summary (keyword and campaign performance), Content Summary, Geo Map overlay (volume of visitors coming from locations around the world). The map points/locations are drill-down in nature, so you can drill down on to a location to see specifics of traffic from that location.

At the end you have Site Overlay report. This is a cool hook into your web site, shown in a frame. The hook processes each link on the page & provides a small information box below the links, which have statistics on that particular link.

As claimed on the site, your report data takes upto 12 hrs to pour in. I signed up and havent heard anything yet, but again its not 12 hrs yet! )
The above example I am sure would let the web admins and designers know a lot about the performance of their site/pages. This is one nice execution by Google. Once Again.

UPDATE: My reports are now available on Analytics. One thing missing though is the Site Overlay report.

Technorati tags: analytics,Google,statistics

FolderShare – A leading private peer-to-peer technology provider, was aquired by Microsoft on Nov. 3rd. Microsoft is gearing up for the Live framework which would converge most of its technologies on the web. The idea behind Live is to provide most of your tools online.

What is Windows Live?

Your online world gets better when everything works simply and effortlessly together. That’s the basic idea behind Windows Live. So the things you care about – your friends, the latest information, your e-mails, powerful search, your PC files, everything – comes together in one place. This is a brand new Internet experience designed to put you in control. And this is just the beginning – you’ll see many more new services in the coming months

As quoted above, notice the ‘your PC files’ part of the statement. This is exactly where FolderShare technology would come into play. This was a no-brainer aquisition from Microsoft. FolderShare technology would drive the idea of synching up your important files from various devices from a single central location – online.