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 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.

Today we released some new features to the Polar Rose website and plugin – detection of duplicate images, statistics and a new functionality in the plugin to make it easier to notify us about bugs.

Duplicates

Duplicate detection means that multiple versions of the same image are grouped together – making it easier for you to get an overview of results for a particular person.

Simply click the link shown above an image that has duplicates and you will open a page showing all the duplicates – even if some images have been cropped, scaled or had other modifications made to them they will still be shown on this page.

When you browse the page of duplicates of an image you can also see all the different websites that the image has be found at.

Statistics

Under the search field on the Polar Rose home page there are now links to pages that show the most popular searches, most named people and the top users on Polar Rose.

Flag as bug

The Polar Rose plugin now includes a checkbox which allows you to quickly and easily flag bugs (roses that appear on things other than faces). Doing this helps us to improve our face recognition and show better results when you search on the Polar Rose website.

We will never rest till our good is better and our better best!

We have just released an update to our plugin user interface with several performance improvements. We still believe we can be faster. We love speed so please stay tuned!

Happy times. After yesterday’s introduction of Jalbum as our initial partner we’re very exited bringing on another two great partners today.

23

23 is the visual sharing company. Its products help individuals, groups, businesses and institutions to act visually in more than 200 countries across the globe on a daily basis.

Twitxr

Twitxr is a mobile photosharing service that lets users easily share pictures and status updates from any mobile phone with their friends on Twitxr, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Picasa. Twitxr has a great iPhone app with automatic geotagging of pictures, plus Windows Mobile and Java applications for most cameraphones around. Additionally users can send pictures and text updates using any mobile device via email and mobile web.

We really look forward working with these fantastic sites, their users, and the people behind.

Only a few days after moving from private to public beta we’ve now opened up for partners as well by releasing the Polar Rose Widget.

This first release is initially for partners to test the functionality on their websites. Over the next few weeks will be getting to feedback and making updates and improvements. We will announce when the widget is fully open to all.

Our first partner – Jalbum

Jalbum is one of the fastest growing photo sharing communities in the world. Jalbum photo albums can have any look, functionality and can be published to any site. Millions of photo albums are distributed over 100’s of thousands of web servers globally, with a current rate of 90 million monthly page views.

Our friends at Jalbum are currently finalizing the remaining tasks to have the widget available to all their users as an opt-in feature. You can get a sneak preview of the widget in action at http://davidekholm.jalbum.net/faces/.

We’re very happy to have Jalbum as our first partner and welcome the Jalbum team and users to Polar Rose.

PS. Read more about the partner widget here http://info.polarrose.com/partners/ where you’ll find a presentation, technical specifications and everything else needed to get started. Remember that we’re some days off from the public release so changes can still occur and please use for testing only.