Polar Rose: The "Duke Nukem Forever" of Web 2.0

A few months ago I heard about an intriguing new website called Polar Rose. It's creators have billed it as a search engine for images... and images of people in particular. Polar Rose is built around facial recognition software that, theoretically, you'll be able to input the picture of a person you know and it will scan for every occurrence of that person's face in photos throughout the Internet.

So I've been keeping an eye out for Polar Rose to debut its service, which was supposed to have been sometime in the first quarter of 2007. We're now headed into the second quarter. There also hasn't been anything new added to the Polar Rose website since about mid-January. I've heard that they were originally going for a December 2006 roll-out. According to one source it might happen this month or in May.

I hope they get on the ball soon and release this, because there's a lot of good potential to be found in an innovation like this. But to have announced it with so much fanfare about what it promises, only to not deliver on time and then not offer something in the way of official feedback, Polar Rose is on track to become the Duke Nukem Forever of Web 2.0... and nobody wants to see that happen.