Here's Flash put to a very intuitive use: Amiglia lets you upload family photos and organize them into a dynamically navigable family tree.  In addition to people, there's also a well put together system for people and places.  Connections are made automatically, import from Flickr or elsewhere, search and email reminders for peoples' birthdays.  The demo on the site is very nice.  Imagine this system combined with Riya.  Amiglia says it's got a free lifetime membership and no ads.  The "price" page is a 404 right now, so I don't know what the business model is here - but it looks like a great little system.  Via eHub.

We had done a successful "How would you change…" feature series over on Engadget that TUAW also recently took up with the "You're in charge…" series. The idea is, pick a gadget/application/web service and create a massively multiplayer wishlist for that thing. Seems like this could work well in SocialSoftwareLandia, so let's see how it goes — How would you change Flickr? I'll start with a few, then please throw your wishlist into the comments…

• Local interestingness — see the most interesting photos only from my contacts / friends / family.

• Interestingness reverse lookup — when viewing one of my photos, I want a way to find out how "interesting" it is — is it in my top 200? Is it #437? How interesting (or not…) is it for this day on Flickr?

• I often wish I could collect other people's photos into sets.

• Some more elegant way to keep track of the 290 groups I'm in… maybe some sort of dashboard page I could drop a few groups into at a time and just monitor several at any one time.

Tag… you're it! How would you change Flickr?

Haven't seen any confirmation or anything other than the standard "we can't comment" since the rumours of Google flirting with Riya started flying. Riya (nee Ojos) uses face recognition technology to help autotag your photo collection. I got a demo of Riya from the uber-fun Tara Hunt at Tagcamp and was pretty impressed — you train the software simply by tagging a few photos of someone, and it then automagically finds other photos of that person and autotags them. It's not perfect yet, but it did make an impressive number of correct matches, even identifying photos where the person's face was turned or in shadow, etc.

Of course I'm going to complain that it's Windows-only (and IE6 only, even, blech!)... which makes it a perfect candidate for the Goog, who loves to stick it to Mac users. ;) Riya plans Firefox and Mac support in the future, so I'm complaining now while the complaining is good. Anywho — you know how rumours are, and we may still not know anything even after Riya's launch party tonight at TechCrunch central.

Om has more on the rumours.

[Via Memeorandum]