Ookles, which we noted as a “Flickr Gunner” back in April, is preparing to launch early next year. The company has been quietly developing their new personal media destination site for about a year now, and has only made a few public comments about the service. I had a chance to see an early demo of Ookles late last week, though, and there are at least a couple of really outstanding features.
Founder Scott Johnson has called it “Flickr+Riya+YouTube” and I think that is an apt description based on what I’ve seen so far. Ookles is a destination site, not an add-on feature for users of Flickr and other services.
Ookles will be a place for users to store personal media (photos, videos and podcasts). Photos will launch first, and will have two key features I’ve not seen on other services: facial recognition and auto albums.
Facial Recognition
It is impossible to talk about facial recognition without mentioning the work Riya has done in this area. But Riya, which has recently focused on a different business, was always torn between becoming a destination site and partnering with competitors like Flickr. Ookles is making no fuss about it – they want you to permanently store your photos on their site.
They are handling facial recognition differently from Riya. See the screen shot below for an idea of how it will work. Like Riya, Ookles will find and show thumbnails of faces from photos, and then analyze that face against other faces in your photos. You tell Ookles which ones are a match. Ookles repeats the process a couple of times until it has a good idea of who the person is. It will then tag all photos with the name, and future photos containing that person will also be auto-tagged. The demo worked perfectly – it took a few steps to train it and then all photos were properly tagged.
Auto Albums
Ookles will take uploaded photos and create auto-albums based on photos taken during a single window in time. It’s a relatively simple feature, but I haven’t seen it anywhere else and I like it. If you take burst photos – a bunch of photos in a second or two hoping one will be good – Ookles will also automatically group these burst photos into a single thumbnail.
It will be hard for Ookles to get real traction against Flickr and the bevy of other photo destination sites around. But I think they may have a chance at success – generating semantic data around images is a huge problem, and people are usually the primary subjects to amateur photos. Any automated process to auto-tag these photos with people’s names will be welcome, and I like the way Ookles is approaching the problem. Flickr is certainly going to have to deal with this at some point, too.
I also like that they will support video and podcast files, too, something Flickr should have implemented long ago. For more on Ookles, listen to Gregory Galants podcast interview with Johnson from April 2006.
I was wondering will there be a privacy issue involved if someone implements facial recognition. What’s if legal authority around the world tracking persons using the huge database. It will be a boon for the legal folks but will it infringe on the privacy rights of individuals. It’s like making a huge database of fingerprints and dna samples. But in my opinion it will be great tools to weed out criminal elements in cyberspace.
If one allows a photo of him/herself on the web, one must assume that this particular image’s information is used elsewhere. The only applicable law (Copyright) does not cover registering index points of the picture. Nor can you claim privacy for the picture is on the web, and therefore, accessible by everyone.
I can, additionally, guarantee you that such database as you describe in fact exists. It’s just not publicly available.
ooooooooh. Photo recognition.
Fun
Technology is moving quickly these days. I wonder if any ill affects of facial recognition will sprout.
That actually looks cool. I’m gonna forward it to my stupid son-in-law now that we’re talking again.
sorry Kingcob – that made me laugh
face recognition: awesome – but it sure will put a of load onto the servers
Sound cool. Hope it could do well in Y07. I tried some face recognition services, they work, but not so friendly. Maybe in next year, they could do better.
-Mike
Tech Tutorials: http://www.hotcoding.com
I put this in the same category as Podzinger – which lets you search within audio and video files. We are working with our nonprofit clients to create large libraries of audio, video and photographic content, with the idea that they can reuse and repurpose this material overtime. The hard part is that unless you can categorize the content it’s not usable – and getting the intern or staff time to do this manually is difficult. There might be a technical solution coming…
I’m either sick of photo type sites or I just don’t get impressed with anything photo-centric anymore.
Good to see this
Andrew- I agree. Too many photo sites out there. They don’t tell any stories, they’re just photos of people mugging for the camera in unnatural poses that mean nothing except to the people in the pictures. As Flickr and Snapfish and all these sites have millions and millions of pictures – will anyone really care? Just like the boxes of photos I have in a closet from years gone by. No one cares. I don’t know, I just can’t get excited either…
dont really see anything fascinating about this company…just another site full of pics!
Auto tagging according to recognition of the objects in an image is very impressing.
Manually tagging uploaded photos is annoying. Auto tagging, or tag suggestions would be excellent.
I don’t see how it is going to succeed. Riya tried the same a year back, failed to get traction (thought they had tremendous press initially), then moved onto different business now. A couple of reasons: a) the technology doesn’t work as expected b) There is no interest for this amongst people. They want plain simple vanilla solution. Train your face, that’s bullshit – and it’s not going to work.
If you’ve listened to the podcast given by the founder in venturevoice, it’s very clear that he blabbers a lot. He talks much and he seems to be over-hyping about whatever he does.
We gotta wait and see how these kinda companies fare.
I think it will take years before we see real face recognition for consumers , Riya attempt is far from OK.
The adding of other media one by one makes me wary. If I’m going to add other types of media at a later time, I would prefer to do so at an established site that already has my photos. Otherwise, give me a place to put everything at once from the beginning–although not many have caught on to this idea. Pickle (www.pickle.com) and One True Media are the only ones that come to mind.
Tagging is one thing; and again, it’s not perfect. But actual facial recognition, or scanning photographs is pretty high-stakes stuff. and I agree with the comments that say real recognition for consumers is a long way off. I’m pretty sure it’s a common practice for photo sites to employ actual people (albeit remotely) to scan for things like adult content and child pornography, because auto-recognition isn’t reliable. While there are companies, labs and organizations that are probably at least as good as Riya and maybe better, you probably won’t hear about them for a while — because the subtleties are complex enough that for high-stakes recognition, ultimately it’s smarter to have humans check.
On the subject of photo sites in general, the teens I know are unimpressed by sites like Flick’r, Snapfish and Riya. They like Fotobucket — they see the sites as dumb storage, and all the bells and whistles as too much work.
Its not about global facial recognition, its about me as a parent being able to tag my photos more easily.
as long as people are logged in, it will be easy to track behavior that violates terms of service. Plus Scott is into creating a service that I will pay him actual dollars to use, for multiple years. Lets see if I renew my flickr pro account next October. I have to see how Ookles shapes up.
Been there, done that.
Amy: The auto-albums by time brings Ookles awfully close to the telling-a-story style of photo sharing. If you group photos by date you can put text with the groups. This brings storytelling in reach. Most photo sharing sites let you label albums (not enough info) or caption photos (too much work if you caption all of them), so people don’t generally use them to tell stories. Ookles may turn out to be different.
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Ookles, but I am affiliated with ourdoings.com, a site that does grouped-by-date-to-tell-a-story photo sharing. It looks like between Ookles, Tabblo and ourdoings.com, people will have different interesting choices for mixing text and photos.
Hi Bruce, ok I can see that as a benefit for people who really want to use the site for storage a lot. Oh and by the way – we will be competitors soon
(not really, maybe potential partners actually). Are you going to be updating the website?
From your “storage” comment I don’t think you understood the storytelling benefit. Anyway, I think we’re straying from the Ookles story. If you want to continue discussion on the ourdoings.com forums that’s fine with me. I’m not afraid of competition.
Seems like a pretty neat idea. I wonder if Google will add facial recognition capabilities any time soon to Picasa? Also, what is the monetization plan for this website? Will they offer print services? Advertising revenue based? A premium plan with larger storage space? Premium features?
Ookles is a step in the right direction, but I really think we need a one-stop remote storage location. I want all my files to be thrown up onto a server, where I can decide if they are public or private, encrypted or un-encrypted, and that includes bit-level versioning support such as in Mozy or Symantec Backup Exec Desktop Laptop Agents.
Finally, many of us (myself included) are big on open standards – what are photo sites doing to create open standards? Shouldn’t users have the right to migrate tag info from one site to another? There should be a way to pull the XML from one site and push it to another, automatically tagging photos that were previously tagged.
This Ookles site has been under construction for almost a year. From what I understand, the company received a very small round of seed funding and there are two people (including the founder) on the payroll. This is hardly a team that can handle such a complex problem as facial recognition etc. This Scott Johnson character is an odd bird. I’ve heard his podcasts and most of the time he makes no sense. Adios…
Scott, good luck! Passion, energy, and integrity – these will be the keys to your success. It is not necessary to listen to those who criticize you. Like the Nike expression – just do it!
You have a vision – go for it. If you succeed, awesome! If you don’t succeed, learn from it and move on!
I look forward to the release of Ookles. My sense is that it will not be just another photo sharing system. Ookles has been under development since 2005, so my hunch is that the first release will be rich in function.
I’m looking forward to it!
Pierre Cutler
The Sacramento Executive
This is silly, the only reason it gets play is because the author of this blog and Johnson are friends. Can’t we waste time talking about a product that might ACTUALLY get launched, funded, and be usefull?
Just one more step toward Big Brother. Although, I am all for this technology used at airport security and border crossings.
Regardless of the use, it is an impressive advancement.
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Facial recognition certainly has its uses. Just need to be careful where those uses are. http://www.movie-source.com/