Everybody was expecting them and here they are: rumors of Google acquiring Riya. It can certainly be a sensible acquisition from Google point of view, but I’m not convinced that this is the best option for little Riya.

They do have a real product and they can have several real business models. They can sell subscriptions to their photo hosting service, they can integrate the proprietary facial recognition system with third party platforms, they can exploit their unique tag space, …

Furthermore digital image processing is a relatively old field, but only recently the explosion of digital cameras created the ground for new markets. Spotting the faces of your friends and relatives is certainly a nice application, but smart people at Riya could certainly figure out other services in different areas both for individuals and companies.

Munjal, Tara,
40 millions are a lot of money, but are you sure you want to become the new Blogger? You have higher expectations than that, don’t you?

Maybe, I’m just plain naive but I thought that one of the Web 2.0 characteristics was innovation flowing from small companies and not big corporation. As usual, you say? Yes, true, but this time the small companies have more chances to survive and stay small and healthy thanks to the connected fabric of the Web 2.0.

“Architecture of participation” is beautiful definition of the Web 2.0 from Tim O’Reilly, but it should apply to users and companies as well. If Web 2.0 collapse to fit into the GYM (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) how much space is being left for participation?

Riya is a service based on facial recognition technology that enable user to spot known people in their photo collections and automatically add tags. See this early review from Techcrunch. I’ve requested an invitation to Tara Hunt, Riya chief blogger, and I’m looking forward to test it on my 2 thousands wedding shots.

But wouldn’t be nice to use Riya as a single sign-on (SSO)platform?

Imagine a web service XYZ that, during the creation of your account, asks to submit a pictures of your face. Then, any time you need to authenticate with XYZ, you can fill in the usual username/password form, or just stare into your webcam. The webcam sends your face straight to a Riya server, meanwhile the XYZ login page send a request to Riya to check if there is a recent pictures of your face matching the face associated to your account in the XYZ database.

The sensitivity of service XYZ will determine how aged could be the picture in the Riya server in order to succeed in the authentication. Less than five seconds for an online banking service, one hour for your web based email, one month for your social bookmark site. (of course given that all requests come from the same IP address)

Since most of our laptops, desktops and mobile phones are equipped with a camera, this scenario could be not science fiction.