Is This the Future of Image Sharing? Face Recognition Website Riya.com In Beta

A new photo sharing and search engine website, Riya.com, claims it works using face recognition technology. I haven't personally gotten into the photo sharing websites before, but I do find this one quite interesting.

Unlike other photo search site, it does "auto-tagging", meaning that once you or someone else uploads a photo and gives it certain tags, other photos recognized as being the same person or even text are automatically tagged the same.

This is great if you have a lot of photos of, say, your kids! You can put them up, share with your family and friends, and don't even have to have your pictures public at all. Pretty neat.

Who can't relate to this?

"We started this company after realizing that we had 1000's of digital photos on our computer all labeled DSC0009.jpg, that our friends just never remembered to send us the photos we wanted from them, and that searching for images on the web just doesn't work very well."

It should be opening to the public in a few weeks. Looking forward to it. Is this the next big site, ready to replace Flickr? I guess we'll see.