Blog readers continue to be treated to an unusual peek behind the scenes in the development of a web 2.0 company.

Last spring, Riya launched with much fan fare in the blogging community, largely due to the ground-breaking social-seeding efforts of Tara Hunt.

Shortly after launch, Tara left the company to pursue her dream and Riya CEO Munjal Shah began a fascinating series of posts about the first months of the company’s public beta. The series culminated with Munjal indicating that the company had decided it needed to change its strategic direction. The beta experience was showing that the market for Riya was someplace else than Munjal and his team had thought it would be.

Munjal’s blog has gone dark for the past several months. Now, he has emerged again with a short post pointing to a substantial post by Riya Board member Peter Rip.

Rip’s post suggests that early stage investing is a bit like “hunt and peck” typing:

Riya’s approach to search is a perfect metaphor for early stage investing.  Eighteen months ago I couldn’t describe the business with any real precision.  We had some great ingredients in a field of opportunity. I figured I’d know it when I saw it. 

And Riya 2.0 will be significantly different than the beta site launched just a few months ago:

…Riya 2.0 is nothing like the Powerpoint we saw in Q1-05.  And it bears no resemblance to the stuff that was on our whiteboard in the Fall of 04.  But this is the nature of early stage consumer.  Change Happens. Iterate. Pivot. Evolve.

The key aspects haven’t changed. The core of the business is still image  analysis and  classification.  We now have 14 researchers just on this problem – perhaps the largest image analysis pure research team in the world – and a huge intellectual property portfolio.  The biggest changes are in how and where we apply the technology. Perhaps the best move we have made is to signal to the photo, social networking, and community sites that we are not in their business at all, enabling us to work together with them and exploit some real economic synergies.  It’s just as important for the world to know what you’re Not as what you Are.

We are in the process of re-defining image search.  The core premise of what we are doing is that there are lots of things humans can’t describe well in text, but we “know it when we see it.” We aren’t so much about searching for images as much as we are about searching with images.   This is really a different kind of search experience. Faces are the most extreme case. Our brains are highly tuned to recognize the most subtle visual dues, but humans can’t verbally describe faces with any precision at all (except for the occasional scar or mole.) 

Fascinating. I’m looking forward to continuing to follow the Riya story. Will they be able to pull off a business success? Stay tuned.