As several people were quick to notice in the comments of older posts on this blog, the Polar Rose site changed on June 28th, the date we rolled out the private beta. While it was obviously a happy day for us here at Polar Rose, we’ve intentionally held back on posting any news since only a limited number of beta users have been let in.

Things have gone really well and while we will continue to be in private beta for some time, the time is now ripe to explain what can be expected in the near and mid-term. Here is a look at a simplified version of our internal roadmap document. We are currently approaching stage 0.2.

We will continuously roll out new features and refine existing ones in both the Firefox plugin and on the Polar Rose site according to the diagram above. We will also steadily increase the number of users we let in. While the first invitations went off to a targeted list of friends and critics, we will as of Monday (16th July) start selecting addresses at random from the nearly 28,000 that have signed up for notification.

“So what’s available now?”

Let’s be clear about one thing: the current version (0.18) of the Firefox plugin is not entirely stable and early beta users will have to take this into consideration. The primary issue is that if too many tabs are open in Firefox the plugin simply stops working properly and a browser restart is required.

We are going to spare you the explicit technical details about this issue, but we’re working with the Dojo community to solve this and are receiving fantastic support from wizards like Alex Russell, Greg Wilkins, and David Davis (thanks guys!).

With that limitation aside, the plugin accurately performs detection of faces in public photos, placing a rose approximately where the pinhole of a jacket would be. Clicking on a rose brings down a modal window with an input field which allows a user to name the person, agree to an existing name or edit an existing name. If there are multiple names from multiple users for a specific found person we show a list of “also known as” names. Your plugin interactions are shown on the Polar Rose site in a results list.

“What are the imminent features?”

Imminent upcoming features that we will roll out are:

• The ability to mark people as favorites


• The ability to mark people as “this is me” (ie. an image of yourself)


• A “grid view” of results to facilitate quicker browsing


• Tags & Comments

“So what’s not included then?”

As those of you who have been following us for a while will notice, there is currently no matching functionality. For instance detecting Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich with the plugin won’t bring up more photos of Lars. Polar Rose is “people-powered”, and unless our users discover photos and contribute (some) data we can’t bring qualified matches. However, the rate at which users are generating data through casual browsing is amazing. In only 15 days, 32 users have discovered 189,739 photos which contain 58,818 people and have added names to 3,668 of these people.

We will start adding automatic matching in “clusters” of photos. The first place you’ll will see a form of this in action will be in Search Agents that will have the ability to let you watch your friends Flickr or 23 photo feeds and will alert you to pictures with you appearing in them.

As our algorithms continue to improve with the data contributed by users we will will reach a point where we enable the matching functionality in the plugin for any detected person where we can provide relevant data. We can’t say when this will happen, it all depends on how quickly detected data grows, but with the numbers above as a guide we anticipate it to be sooner rather than later.

“What’s in the mid-term?”

As shown in the diagram above there are some other features that appear on our road map:

• Privacy functions to prevent us indexing images that users do not want indexed


• An adult content filter to enable users to view adult content in results only if they wish to do so


• RSS & Blog badges to enable the publishing of results on other websites


• Crawling of popular sites to automatically detect faces in images and further increase the the amount of detected data


• A version of the plugin for Internet Explorer


• A royalty free Javascript API to enable the broader web community to interact with Polar Rose

In closing…

If you have signed up to be a beta tester please be patient as we can’t accommodate all 28,000 requests in the near term, once that invite comes we hope you will have fun exploring and using Polar Rose, please do send us your feedback!

Changes to database servers will give up to two hours of downtime this Sunday July 16 between 20:00 and 22:00 CET. Downtime will affect both the polarrose.com site and the browser plugin.

Like most other blogs this blog has been heavily attacked by blog-spam. Akismet has done a fair job keeping most spam out (48,491 and counting as of today), but some was still making it’s way through.

The next obvious step was to install a captcha solution and as you’ll see at the bottom of this post, we’re now using reCaptcha.

reCaptcha was conceived by one of our very biggest heroes here at Polar Rose, namely Luis von Ahn, assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University and father of the fantastic ESP Game (licensed to Google as the Google Image Labeler).

Along with stopping spam, reCaptcha helps the Internet Archive digitize parts of books that could not be automatically OCR’ed.

So keep those comments coming!

PS. I wrote more about reCaptcha on the O’Reilly Radar team blog where I also post.