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.

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!

Today we release a new site with a cleaner simpler look & feel. The main focus of this release is improved search functionality including clustered search results (stacks as we like to call them) based on facial similarity.

The Polar Rose plugin is now available for Internet Explorer (version 7) so please try it out and report any bugs that you find! We also made some modifications to the plugin user interface to bring it in line with the new site look.

User interface improvements…

The main goal of the user interface re-design was to make searching and browsing results easier and more intuitive. We also wanted to simplify the other interaction points (forms, settings etc.) and the plugin user interface. Finally we wanted to create a user interface which is easier to expand upon and add new functionality to.

Look out for an upcoming post with more about the future user interface developments we are working on.

Under the hood…

We have built a new flexible and scalable infrastructure to support increased numbers of users – more beta invites will be sent out soon! We also now utilize a content delivery network (CDN) to make the output of search queries faster.

In closing…

Todays release represents a lot of hard work by the whole team at Polar Rose and we all look forward to your feedback and comments. We are already busy designing and developing many improvements and new features which we will be releasing over the coming weeks and months!