Well, its been 6 weeks since the release of the new site, and therefore it’s time for a big update!

Many changes and improvements have been made. Here’s a list covering most of them:

• A special “seen-with” tab, that can be accessed from within a stack.


• All of the tabs now have proper URLs, like http://www.polarrose.com/found/paris+hilton/stack1/seen-with/#60. These can be accessed directly and will even remember how many results were displayed, when you browse back to them.


• New front-page, with more explanation of what Polar Rose is and does.


• A screencast of Polar Rose in action!


• Your collections (found, favorites, me) are now shown as stacks on your homepage, which is now located directly at www.polarrose.com! The old URL for your homepage will redirect you automatically.


• The top bar has been simplified, with prominent “home”, “downloads” and “help” buttons

There is also a minor update to the Firefox plugin (to version 0.55.9). The changelog is as follows:

• Fixes roses not appearing on certain sites, like people.com.


• Updated status bar icons for Firefox 3 Mac.

The server-side of the plugin has also seen several performance enhancements.

Oh yeah… we’re also going public beta! No more invites. No more waiting around. Just sign up and get an account immediately!

We are of course not sitting still. There is much more to come over the next couple of weeks!

As most of the active beta testers will have discovered by now through the Firefox auto-update service, we released a major upgrade of the plugin on Monday evening, taking us to version 0.50.

A few visible highlights of the release:

• Stability! As those of you who have used the plugin know – and as originally reported – the plugin has had a longstanding issue of often losing connection and stopping to show roses. This has been solved and I’m happy to see the web sprinkled with roses again.


• Several core performance enhancements, including a much faster rendering of roses on photos.


• New status and error messages for better debugging.


• Improved auto-complete of names (which will get better yet soon)

The new plugin is basically a full rewrite and for those of you who are interested in the underlying solution, we have started rendering the drop-down naming window as an iframe served from polarrose.com. This allows much greater flexibility with regards to adding new features to the plugin by simply changing the corresponding pages server-side.

(For a more in-depth overview read the separate post by my colleague Stefan Arentz.)

Next up will be the Internet Explorer plugin, the first matching using the data that has been accumulated by our beta users, and finally our APIs – two of the three will be coming in time for Christmas.

Please report any issues through the feedback page or feel free to comment directly on this post.

Finally, thanks to Mo Jo for leading this rewrite and the rest of the crew in Warsaw, Amsterdam and Malmö for making this happen.

PS. We’ll be adding more beta users as soon as the new plugin has proven itself in the wild over the next days.

A service message to our beta users…

Today we’ve updated the Polar Rose plugin to version 0.26. The changes aren’t immediately visible, but the update contains several performance enhancements.

Unfortunately, Firefox’s autoupdate functionality doesn’t always work as intended and we’re getting a few reports that the plugin is not being updated automatically. Instead, please click the “Find updates” button which you can find under Tools > Add-ons in Firefox’s menu to manually find updates.

Should even that fail, you can always manually download the latest version at the Polar Rose downloads page.

As the number of photos and Polar Rose explorers steadily grows, so does the number of features on our site. In our last post we described our rough roadmap and we are happy to announce a bunch of new features from that list.

Favorites

This is a way for you to mark photos that you like. Just click the star icon underneath the thumbnail. Photos marked as favorites will end up on your favorites page.

New menu

We are making it easier to agree and suggest names or AKA’s directly on the photos on our site. Clicking on the face thumbnails will present a menu that lets you enter or agree to names just like when using the plugin. The menu also has the following functions which are enabled by marking the appropriate check-boxes:

• This is me! – This is a way for you to show the world who you are. Photos marked as “me” will end up on your “me” page. There will also be some other fun things to do with these photos in the future.


• User avatars – This allows you to select a face to be your avatar.


• Adult content filter – Marking photos as adult content will let you and other users filter those images in your results. Photos with adult content are moderated. In your account settings page you can enable or disable the filtering of adult content.

Grid view

The grid view is a great navigational tool for quickly browsing through results on pages. It comes in two sizes and shows thumbnails arranged in a grid structure – 5-by-5 (large thumbnails) or 10-by-10 (small thumbnails).

Finally…

A lot of people are asking us when they will be let in to try out the stuff we are talking about. We are quickly ramping up the number of invites and still selecting them at random from those who have signed up. If you haven’t received an invite email, please have patience.

We also have a surprise ready for next week… more on that later.

And remember, your feedback is always welcome.

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!