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Polarbot is here!

Thanks to Tomek, Tomek, Mikael and the rest of our team, we can finally show off something we have been playing with internally for some time.
Our Polarbot is here!


Polarbot example


Polarbot is a little script that looks for unnamed people in photos we find across the web and checks against named near-duplicates. This means that we can now spread the names contributed by our users to more photos, thus making more stuff searchable and more information available when browsing with the plugin.


We have more ways of spreading the data and increasing our reach planned, stay tuned and do check in on our Polarbot from time to time to see what he is up to.

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This entry was posted by Jan Erik Solem on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 19:24 and is filed under Notes, Release. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

10 Responses to “Polarbot is here!”

  1. Jens Says:
    September 17th, 2008 at 20:19

    Please make an option in user settings, where you can chose to not share information about which pictures/people you named.

    Sometimes you might name pictures, that you don’t want to be associated with.

    So you should make a privacy option, so that you can chose that other people cannot see the list of which pictures you named, and also cannot see on a picture who named it, if it was you.

    Also the ability to remove pictures from the pictures you named list would be nice.

    Pictures could just be said to be named by anonymouos.

    Else there are lots of pictures that won’t get named, and I spend lots of time naming pictures whenever I happen to know who they were, and therefore also named some that I don’t want to be associated with.

    So it’s a privacy problem as it is right now.

  2. September Says:
    September 17th, 2008 at 20:22

    Is Polarbot a he or a she?

  3. cougarten Says:
    September 19th, 2008 at 01:20

    wow fuck YEAH! (sry I drunk a beer)

  4. cougarten Says:
    September 19th, 2008 at 01:40

    can (or do you) notify the people when their plugin recognised a face on the page they are currenty browsing? would be a great ego-pusher-thing, because you would feel to contribute and be exited about hte technology even if you are to lazy to name by hand

  5. foxops Says:
    September 20th, 2008 at 10:03

    So how is Polarbot finding these pics? Is there a spider that is focusing on certain sites or is it going off pics that plugin users encounter? I really hope it uses both methods, I’d love to see “Polarbot” in my apache logs :)

  6. Jan Erik Solem Says:
    September 20th, 2008 at 13:54

    @Jens: We decided to start with public images and make names and who added them public because it gives lots of useful information and our users the ability to connect and follow each others activity. Having an anonymous option at the point of naming is an interesting idea, we’ll give it some thought!

    @cougarten: Good point. Other than the fact that roses are red for people named by the Polarbot (same as if any user added a name), we are not notifying at the moment. Being notified when the Polarbot finds pictures of you is probably a good thing to add also.

    @foxops: Only on pages that users have visited for now. We will deploy a simple spider soon that actually checks more pages, more on that later…

    Thanks for all the feedback folks!

  7. Jens Says:
    September 26th, 2008 at 00:46

    Well, if you don’t at least make an option for people to remove their account, and thereby remove their names from the pictures they tagged, you have a privacy problem.

    I stopped tagging, because I was in the habit of just tagging every picture that I came across and I knew who was in it, but that lead to there being pictures I don’t really want to be associated with.

    Now anyone can go to polarrose, lookup my name and see all the pics I tagged.

    I’m not happy with it.

  8. 123 Says:
    September 26th, 2008 at 16:41

    @ Jens: This service is a huge privacy violation. I hope they will create tools , which will solve those issues. The fact that I can’t control the presence on my own pictures online sucks big time.

  9. kylek Says:
    September 26th, 2008 at 18:38

    Hi,

    yes, i am also not happy about that! why is it so important to publish the name of the user who tagged the pic? i think that more pictures will be tagged in future, if the tagger has the option to remove his name from the picture.

    i don´t like to see what pics other users had found. the pics are the only important thing! not the users! thats my opinion!

    so please remove the names of the users! or at least my name from my tagged pictures!

    thanks for reading and greetings!

    kylek

  10. Jan Erik Solem Says:
    September 30th, 2008 at 20:48

    @Jens, @kylek: We are taking your feedback seriously and are now committing to a solution that lets users control if they want to show or hide their found pictures and their names next to pictures across the site.

    Stay tuned, we will announce it on this blog as soon as this is deployed.

    Thanks again for caring and giving your comments,
    /Jan Erik

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