Flock was a web browser until last year:
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_(web_browser)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_(web_browser)</a><p>I know there are only so many names, but in this case both flocks are social apps, tracking updated photos between friends.<p>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.
<p><pre><code> 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.
</code></pre>
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.<p>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.<p>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.: <a href="http://www.tomjstokes.com/130/iphone-ios-4-2-background-location-service-observations" rel="nofollow">http://www.tomjstokes.com/130/iphone-ios-4-2-background-loca...</a>
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.
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.
Somewhat unrelated tip: The font on this blog is too small. I just measured and it is taking up only 20% of my screen.<p>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. :)<p>[1] <a href="http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp</a>
This, finally, is the fourth paragraph:<p><i>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.</i><p>At least it stands alone, making it somewhat more (quickly) identifiable.<p>And such formulation (as in this comment, by the way) is what is known as "burying the lede". [1]<p>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.<p>--<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bury_the_lede" rel="nofollow">http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bury_the_lede</a>