So, I live with two women. One’s my wife and the other’s my sister-in-law. Suhani’s been staying with us, interning at my agency, taking photography classes (she’s amazing with an SLR,) making friends, and doing all the things that smart, beautiful, talented 21 year-olds are supposed to do.

I’m on the road four days a week for work, and have this habit of buying DVD sets of TV shows so I can watch them on longer plane rides. Recently, while I was away one week, both sisters decided to start watching season one of Alias, the adventures of Sydney Bristow and her band of merry spies. It’s gotten compelling enough that they’re now in the middle of season 4, and any time is Alias time. So, there I am, on our bed with my laptop while they’re both sprawled across eating Doritos and intently watching for the next shocker.

If you’re the one person who hasn’t seen the show, it’s a rolicking set of implausible costume changes and spy-meet-cutes, with more plot twists over the past five years than there exist numbers. The best part of the show (for us, anyway) is Marshall, the funny Ops Tech guy, a modern day version of Ian Fleming’s “Q”. We especially like things like the super-fast photo recognition software that matches faces in an instant.

While I’m sure things like that exist somewhere, imagine my surprise when I found this. Riya.com is photo-recognition for the masses. Identify your images on your hard drive and sites like Flickr, train the software to recognize certain faces, and it will start finding other images on the Web and in your collection that have those specific people you identified.

It’s still in Alpha, but imagine the possibilities!