The O'Reilly Radar profiled a pre-release service today named SuperOyster.  It's to be federated out to commercial vendors with high demand and a line of prospective customers.  The vendors use it to manage their waiting lists and draw revenue by facilitating the sale of postions in line to people with longer to wait, for whatever.  Football tickets, winery events, super exclusive foo-fee-foos.  I don't know that much about rich people, but isn't a certain amount of the hipness quotient mitigated by the public knowledge that you didn't get into the soiree because you were hip enough to know about it first - but because you bought out some one else who did?

One way or the other, I find this software offering-to-be fascinating.  The company says it utilizes "a patent pending process known as waiting list monetization."  Presuming they get past the non-obviousness requirement in the patent proccess, it could be quite a succesful service.  I'm sure their value proposition will rest in the quality of their services, even if you or I feel like we should have thought of that once we see what they are doing.  Their FAQ adresses the "why should I not just use eBay?" question by saying that they provide a direct link through the trusted vendor you're wanting a ticket to patronize.  I imagine most jerks online would be less willing to stiff say, the 49ers, than you or me over eBay.  That's an interesting proposition in thematic terms, and seems smartly alligned with some key psychological tendencies in the e-commerce space.

Keith Teare and Michael Arrington were kind enough to give me a tour of their new online listings service Edgeio last week and now that it's begun to open to invited users seems as good a time as any to write that conversation up.  I thought the concept, look and functionality of Edgeio all looked great.  I'll discuss those, but I'm also interested in some of the questions the service will face at it forges into a radically new space for information services.

The basic idea behind Edgeio is that off-site content producers (bloggers and others) will add meta-data to their own content that will designate certain information as intended to appear on Edgeio.  That content will include, but not necessarily be limited to, items for sale and events being promoted online.  There are a variety of ways this will be done, ranging from simple code like many people add for tags destined for Technorati to an even more usable text signifier that can be added for users uncomfortable with HTML.  Arrington says bloggers will be the primary contributors of content to Edgeio, but that any site that publishes an RSS feed will be able to participate.  All of this is good news for usability and diversity of content.

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]