Despite a great deal of initial buzz-hype, Munjal Shah's Riya photo recognizer deflated into irrelevance in a matter of months. However, after reapplying the same tech to visual shopping searches, Shah's Like.com has proven a boon for those who must know where Forest Whitaker gets his neckties. Mockery aside, it's a much better use of the software with an obvious revenue hook. Even so, it must be grating to have Riya still stinking up the place, reputation-wise, as in this Business 2.0 article on the benefits of failure. "Just eight months after watching Riya sink like a stone," begins the paragraph introducing Like.com's relative success. Hey, leave Riya alone; according to its website, it's still in beta.

After impressing almost no one for so, so long, Ning has relaunched and reclaimed the hearts and minds of techbloggers. Ning allows the free construction of Facebookesque social networks, customizable with a variety of content and content sources. Construction tools are dead easy, using a drag-and-drop layout similar to Typepad. Ning — largely funded by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and cofounded by Web 2.0 hottie Gina Bianchini — is banking on the contextual ad market to support the site (though subscribers can sell their own ads by forking over a few bucks). Fortunately for nostalgia's sake, some of Ning's early triumphs remain intact — for example, Who Is a Bigger Douche.