Facial recognition service Riya will shut down on August 21, 2009, says founder Munjal Shah in an email to users this morning. We are adding it to the TechCrunch DeadPool . This was one of the original services that defined the early Web 2.0 movement. We first covered it, then known as Ojos , four years ago. The service changed its name to Riya before launching at a party, yes, in my back yard . Here's our fist full overview of the Riya product, which helped users by auto-recognizing friends in photos and tagging them. The company came close to selling to Google , but the deal never closed. And eventually the company refocused its efforts on visual search ecommerce (and is still going strong at like.com ). The email is below.