BigShinyThing

A friend of ours has just added a plug-in to his Facebook profile, described thusly:

Trakzor is a new facebook tool that helps people see who is checking them and their friends out. Click above to see who is viewing me on facebook, who I’m viewing, and from there…get Trakzor to see who is viewing YOU.

Whilst offices across the country stutter to a halt, that’s what are all these folk on Facebook are actually doing. They’re looking at you looking at them looking at everyone else. All bloody day. Now this is what the boys over at Gaydar have been doing for years but — in contrast — they don’t so much observe as (ahem) seal the deal.

All of this really amounts to everyone sticking a great big ‘I exist’ sign on their heads — we admit it, we’re there too (who isn’t?). In the hyper-connected now, is all we need to show that we really really matter a thriving Facebook profile and a bubbling-over Twitter feed?

BigShinyThing now has a group on Facebook — if you can’t beat, join (etc). Come on over for a chat.

Move over Flickr. New-kid-on-the-blog (beta release, currently offline, better call the VCs in for another cash injection) photo-sharing/search site Riya is stirring up a storm.

Why? Advanced image processing, including in-image face recognition and text search. Want to find every picture of your ex? With Riya those pictures don’t have to be hand-tagged ‘insensitive slob’ to come up in your search results — the software knows who (and what) is in each image. ‘Find more pictures with this person in’ is just a click away. Or will be, when they iron out the bugs. Vapourware? Maybe. Or maybe, just maybe they really have what it takes, and simply decloaked a little early — nothing is riskier for a tech startup than to be in the media spotlight a couple of months before the product is ready for a credible beta release!

Either way they’ve been impressing the tech opinion formers. Check out CNET’s review and slideshow, or Riya’s award-winning presentation at the DEMO 06 techfest.

The dark side of Riya is in the implications that content-based search — particularly face-based search — have for privacy. That’s a wait-and-see. Certainly another interesting tool for the avid cyber-stalker.

We’ll keep you in the picture as the story progresses…