When time affords, I've been looking over two widely hyped web betas - Riya and Ether.

Riya is a "next generation" Flickr online photo web app, enabled with facial and text recognition. Expectations about the facial and text recognition have hugely scaled back from the hysterical claims being made months ago (now they're giving long lists of caveats, warning that it's just getting started and that you should focus more on the photo album capabilities). Given that this is supposed to be the site's killer feature, it will be interesting to see where they go with that. I'm going to try it out with a load of test photos and see how it compares.

Ether is a rather interesting service that arranges calls through phone service providers and clients, charging a, ahem, "pimp fee" for the service. It's quite a clever idea, and can greatly simplify the infrastructure and billing requirements for small phone service providers. On the downside it requires callers to register with Ether, which is a requirement that will definitely reduce acceptance (if it was "976" style billing, where the billing automatically goes on the phone bill, I would imagine it would do better, though of course that isn't really possible globally).

I can't really see a huge market for this service, but they've built quite a nice web app for the system, and the phone infrastructure seems to work well.

Potentially it could be used for easily billing out phone support for those who follow the software development model of "release the software for free and then charge for support".

Dennis Forbes 1-888-MY-ETHER ext. 01384785

(Note: I don't actually expect anyone to call that, as telephone style services aren't really my forte. Perhaps if I got in the astrology industry it would have more utility).

On the topic of neat web services, and while thinking of Ether, there's another clever one I was pointed to recently - http://www.jajah.com/.