Search, Sex and Shopping - making picture search pay?

Video and Picture search is hard, as the many PhD's in Universities and R&D labs who have tried to do this will testify. (Yahoo and UC Berkely started an entire research lab to get into this overall space, after all). Getting it right, you would think, would open amazing opportunities.

Not so, it would seem. Today Riya.com, an early pioneer, has metamorphosed into Like.com - allowing shoppers (mainly women judging by the content) to take a picture of some piece of bling worn by a sleb and then search for similar items of like watches, boots etc in online mail order houses.

The last time I saw an application like this being used in anger was for porn, an application called MiltonSoft

So, the true monetisation for picture search is Sex and Shopping?

Actually, the thing that interested me most about this was the sheer volume of commentary from the Big Blogs. It appeared as expected on TechCrunch and on GigaOm - but what was fascinating was the sheer number of comments (up at 72 and still going on TechCrunch as I write, a very high number for a relatively small startup), and that luminaries such as Robert Scoble and Don Dodge appear on the comments pages giving their opinions.

So, why all the hoopla - is it picture search itself, or is it sound Blogmarketing?

No doubt a succesful picture based search model will be followed closely by many players, as the potential applications are (in theory) far greater than sex and shopping. However, I think this is also a great lesson for Marketing in the Blog Age.

Riya and Like's CEO Munjal Shah has appeared on the various majors' comments pages, giving more details about Like. But he has also been authoring a blog about his experiences as CEO of a small company in a changing world - anyone who has been in his position will definitely empathise!

As to whether Like.com will work - Scoble is positive, Don Dodge is more skeptical and Liz Gannes over at GigaOm is fairly neutral.

My view...this is a Blog age Marketing masterclass, well done to Like.com !

Postscript....seems like my suspicion of Blog Age marketing was spot on...here is Michael Arrington's personal blog on the matter, looks like it was Scoble-izing wot did it. Interesting lessons indeed.