Riya is a much hyped yet to be beta-launched social photo sharing site. Their key innovation is facial recognition that lets users tag and discover people in photos. Mujnal Shah, the founder of Riya, has uploaded a bunch of screenshots and bulleted lists of features that the Alpha testers have requested and they've delivered.

If nothing else, this company has mastered the art of prelaunch PR through blogs. A subject I've been studying and discussing quite a bit lately.

But, I also think these guys have some cool and far out stuff. If they can get to a critical mass of users and these users tag photos and their algorithms can recognize people based on the tags in other photos, that'll be pretty awesome. In fact, it might be one of the first cases where users of the web can teach computers to do our thinking. This could be an important step in making Nova Spivack's Collective Intelligence.