Riya is a company I have mentioned previously – they have an incredible application which combines text and facial recognition with photo uploading, so that once you tell Riya who is who in your photo albums, it will recognise those people from then on out in any photos it sees! Riya also has tagging built in to the application – like any half-decent web 2.0 application. Riya is due to launch tomorrow.

Now comes the rumour/news that Riya is being bought by Google – before it has even launched! I have to stress the news that this is still just a rumour – and the way rumours grow legs on the blogosphere (remember the Technorati buyout rumours?), it may well be completely untrue.

However, given Yahoo!’s purchase of Flickr, Google needs a cool photo app like this to maintain a presence in this space – then again, so does Microsoft! Anyone want to start a Microsoft is buying Riya rumour? Funny, Robert Scoble didn’t mention it in the interview of him which I podcast yesterday… then again, he wouldn’t, would he? 😉

UPDATE:
I see Michael Arrington and Dave Winer and others have picked up on this story as well.