Get all the photos your friends took with you, forward and backwards in time.

Get all the photos your friends took with you, forward and backwards in time.(blog.bu.mp)

63 points by jmintz 13 years ago | 25 comments

Toucan 13 years ago |

Flock was a web browser until last year: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_(web_browser)

I know there are only so many names, but in this case both flocks are social apps, tracking updated photos between friends.

I wonder if Zynga (the owners of flock.com now) will have anything to say about this, though I find it hard to imagine it hasn't already been discussed.

tomstokes 13 years ago |

    Flock uses new battery-friendly location technology and
    sophisticated algorithms to magically know which of your
    Facebook friends you are with when photos are taken.

My bet is that they're using the background significant location change service. Each time iOS wakes the app with a significant location change notification, Flock combs through your photos and sends their GPS coordinates from the EXIF data to the Flock servers.

What I'm really concerned about, though, is that to pull this off the app must send your location to the Flock servers for correlation with other users' photo locations. This means Bump now has a reasonably accurate location log for everyone using the Flock app.

I wrote a test app for the iOS significant location change service that logged my location for a week, and it was surprisingly accurate. Enough to clearly tell when I was at work, at home, driving down the freeway, etc.: http://www.tomjstokes.com/130/iphone-ios-4-2-background-loca...

swalsh 13 years ago |

I wish there was a way for ordinary hackers to work on electric airplanes, space shuttles, or robots on the side rather than photo sharing apps.

ahuibers 13 years ago | |

Flock math department here. Robots are software-limited, and Flock has more overlap with robotics on the software side than people might think. At Bump we have been writing software to exchange bits of stuff between computers that 50% of the population has attached to their bodies. Flock is actively making decisions for the human based on situational awareness. The machine learning and statistical techniques we are using are the same ones that are being using in robotics for e.g. situational awareness and path/task planning.

If anyone out there is interested in being a developer in my group and is handy with algorithms and fast data stores e.g. Redis, ideally in production, email me.

jmintz 13 years ago | |

Solar airplane: http://solarimpulse.com/en/timestop/job-offer/

Space ship: http://www.spacex.com/careers.php

Robots: http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/jobs

We are hiring also: http://bu.mp/company/jobs

swalsh 13 years ago | | |

I only bring it up because in the first paragraph you said it started as a side project. I apologize for my comment though, this was a bad thread to post it.

My original point though, was that sometimes I feel like we make these apps, because that's what we're capable of making by ourselves. The links you posted are great opportunities for what we can do together. But I think there's still a large opportunity out there. Think about how many people actually completed the Stanford AI course. I think it was something close to 20k. There's a HUGE amount of people who have day jobs, but have the potential to do BIG things on the side. Except they're all off on their own, so they build iphone apps.

I'm starting to get an idea here :D

pclark 13 years ago | |

I think you'd touch a lot more lives if you worked on solving the photo sharing problem for 3 years than working on electric airplanes for 3 years. Also: your comment is rude.

savrajsingh 13 years ago | |

See diydrones.com -- lots of ordinary hackers making extraordinary things. By the way, the people at bump do it by choice I'm sure. No one's forcing them to make a photo sharing app. :)

jsmcallister 13 years ago |

How will this be any different than the shared photo albums built-in to iOS6? Granted, I have not had the pleasure of using Flock or iOS6 - so this is not a rhetorical question.

jmintz 13 years ago | |

The two problems we see with getting all the photos your friends took with you are 1) you have to remember to share and whom you want to share with and 2) its a pain to share them all with just a couple people (and have their photos added as well). We think all that work is what prevents us from getting all the photos our friends took with us.

With shared photo albums on iOS6 it will be really easy to share a set of photos on your phone. It will not remind you to share and it will not consolidate everyone's photos into a single album.

Watch the Flock video to see how this works: http://vimeo.com/46398388

With Flock you just use any camera app as you normally would and when you leave the event Flock gives you a 1-touch page (not automatic, users still have control) of what to share and with whom.

jsmcallister 13 years ago | | |

"Flock is not just a brand new app; we see it as a brand new kind of app. While most apps today jockey for our ever-dwindling time and attention, attempting to become one of the apps that we think about the most, Flock is different. We designed Flock so you don't have to think about it at all."

Great quote that really stands out after downloading the app. Fiancee and I are going to give it a try this weekend with some friends. I'm assuming, now that I've used it for a few hours, that it combines location AND time to make a best guess on what an event was. Very cool.

One thing that would be nice is to block out a certain location. For instance, we both take a ton of pictures at our house on a daily basis. For me, it's pictures of delicious things I'm pulling off the Big Green Egg. For her, it's pictures of our dog and her freshly-painted nails.

However, the instant combination of our travel photos earned a phone call from said fiancee. She loves it. Big props.

jsmcallister 13 years ago | | |

Great video.

ivankirigin 13 years ago |

I've been using this app in beta for a while and it is so awesome. I really think this follows a new design pattern for mobile where the app is so smart it pings you when you should use it.

daurnimator 13 years ago |

forward in time? Break ALL the causality.

JacobAldridge 13 years ago | |

"Here are the photos of you dancing at the party next week. Do you still want to go?"

jmintz 13 years ago | | |

In-app purchase: dance lessons

jedberg 13 years ago |

Somewhat unrelated tip: The font on this blog is too small. I just measured and it is taking up only 20% of my screen.

I'd suggest a bigger font to make it more readable. Over 85% of people use a screen bigger than 1024x768 [1]. Take advantage of that. :)

[1] http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp

icebraining 13 years ago | |

Over 85% of w3schools.com users have a screen bigger than 1024x768. Most people have never been to w3schools.

jedberg 13 years ago | | |

I'm pretty sure their survey data comes from lots of websites, not just theirs.

pasbesoin 13 years ago |

This, finally, is the fourth paragraph:

Flock finds the photos you take together with family and friends and magically brings all the photos from each person's phone together into a single shared album.

At least it stands alone, making it somewhat more (quickly) identifiable.

And such formulation (as in this comment, by the way) is what is known as "burying the lede". [1]

I mention it because I'm getting rather tired of not just blog posts but also essays, news articles, and even marketing copy (which the OP could also be considered), that makes me read 200, 300, or 500 words before I learn what they are talking about.

[1] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bury_the_lede

jmarbach 13 years ago |

How is this different from popset?

evan_ 13 years ago | |

It has a different name, is made by different people, the two apps have entirely different feature-sets and focus, etc

immy 13 years ago | | |

Both have the same value proposition. Flock has far clearer messaging.