Mark Smith's Journal

In Charlotte, NC (CLT) waiting for my flight to New Orleans (MSY).

The company I work for, Bump Technologies, has just this morning released our new application: Flock - Photos Together!

First: I am really, really excited about this launch. Like seriously.

Flock is one of those rare applications that really solves a problem people have. It takes something that, to this day, is really hard and annoying -- and practically makes it magical. It makes your life easier and more joyful, which is something that technology should be doing more of, but unfortunately doesn't.

Yes, I acknowledge my bias. Trust me though, if I wasn't really excited, I wouldn't take the time to write this here. But I am going to, because Flock is, in my opinion, just that good.

So, what does it do?

Let's talk about the typical way people share photos. Pretend you and some of your friends go out to get some food and see a concert. You each take some photos. When you get home, you want to share these photos with your friends -- well, thankfully Facebook exists! You each can upload your photos into galleries, fantastic!

Except... now each of you has a separate gallery. And Tom really is slow, he didn't upload his photos. "I'll get around to it", but you know that you'll still be waiting in a year -- if he ever remembers. Oh man, now you have to go share the gallery and hope that everybody sees it, and who the hell knows what stories Facebook chooses to show everybody... well, you can tag people so it emails them, but that's quite a bit of work!

Now you've spent three hours on this, longer than you spent at the concert! This entire workflow is a royal pain in the ass. It requires far too much human interaction and intervention and effort, and half of it never gets done.

Enter Flock: view my Flock event!

That is a web gallery that was assembled by Flock this morning. The people you see took photos with their phones, then they each got a notification from Flock (which they had previously installed): "Hey, you took some photos with Shona, Sunil, and others!"

That keys you to launch the Flock app, where it has already discovered that you took some photos near some of your friends. You can then select which photos you want to share and hit the button to do so. (You still have control over what you share!)

Your friends then get a notification that you've shared photos with them. Flock enables you to "like/+1/<3" the photos and also leave comments on them. This is shared with everybody who is on the album and you get push notifications so you can stay on top of things.

So, what actually happened here?

Without giving away too much of the secret sauce, the mojo is that Flock combines your Facebook information (people you know) with geographical information (where you took each photo). It combines this with all of your friends who use Flock to determine when you have taken photos together. It then pushes notifications down to you to let you know, and handles the heavy lifting of building a group photo album.

Instead of relying on everybody to upload photos, tag them, and then watching Facebook for them to appear -- that entire workflow is now reduced to the Magic Point: you don't have to figure out how to do it, Flock takes care of it. You still get total control and can share or not share as you like, but now you get to live your life as you like without all of the headaches of sharing photos between friends.

And before you ask: yes, this launch is iPhone only, and yes, it requires you to use and connect to Facebook. I know that rules out some of you, but for those of you who fit this bill... give it a whirl, let me know what you think.

Also, of course, Flock is only useful when people have it. Get your friends and family on it and see what happens. :)

Dreamwidth now supports media hosting. Limited for now. More soon.

My favorite feature of this code push is Markdown! Let's see if this works. PS, hi exor674!

I changed my default icon. Please don't be alarmed.

P.S. I love that clock in the background. It's a mechanical clock with exposed gears and it makes a delightful ticking sound and dings every hour. It has a big weight that I have to raise every day or two and adjust the time slightly. It's brilliant.

It's coming. If you aren't protected, or aren't sure what I'm talking about, you should take a few minutes and go read through this very well done post:

http://arduinna.dreamwidth.org/38503.html

The short summary, however, is that soon Google is changing their privacy policy and some other things. This is going to allow them to more easily connect all of your information from various sources. You might be surprised at how much information Google has about you, it can be truly scary to think that anybody -- particularly a large, faceless corporation -- can know that much about you.

This is something important to me, and particularly as I am getting older, something I am getting more and more concerned about. I'm now taking steps to reduce my online footprint and reduce it.

It has been quite a morning so far. My company, Bump Technologies, just released a new major release of our app. Bump 3.0 is out for Android right now, and iPhone later today (hopefully). This release is the culmination of months of work and excitement.

Anyway, we launched about two hours ago, and we've already had 16,600 people download and install the app. There have been thousands of bumps and over a thousand matches, and thousands of photos shared. It's really interesting working for a company that has such a huge userbase -- over 75 million downloads -- the numbers are really huge and cool.

Most of the company got in at 4:30 AM today to be ready for the launch. Our wonderful HR/recruiting/admin team slaved over hot cooking devices for two hours to make us waffles and other breakfast stuff. Now the sun is up and everybody is either yawning and debating napping, or sitting down to do some work.

Days like this are exciting, and make me think fondly of the night we launched Dreamwidth to Open Beta. Watching people rush in and start using the site was so amazing. This whole "making stuff people like" thing is really addictive!

Anyway, tired now. I'll try to stick it out as long as I can, but I expect I won't make it past lunch.

Technology does eventually fail. One of my LCDs (both of which are pushing 5 years old now) has started to go bad on me. It originally was just having one row of pixels that would flicker in and out from time to time. Now the bottom third of the screen flickers every few seconds, making it really hard to use. That was a few days ago.

Today, it's shut off on me twice and the video card deemed that it was no longer there and collapsed all of my windows on to the main display. Pulling the cord off and reconnecting it caused it to wake up again. Only to repeat a few hours later. Annoying.

Now back to code. That is all.

Thanks everybody. I'm an uncle now, and the baby and mother are doing fine. A big scare, but it looks like it's all worked out. Congratulations to my brother Ryan, I'm really excited for you dude!

I have learned an important lesson about baby boys.

In short, it seems that the waste elimination system that feeds his butt and the one that feeds his penis are on separate timers. (You parents know where this is going already, I bet.)

The practical side of this lesson is that I have now, something like five times, been in the middle of changing a diaper stained, smeared, or otherwise full of poop and have felt a startlingly warm and wet sensation followed shortly after by the thought "aw damn, he's peed on me again!" I've been getting better about positioning the new diaper and catching it, but it's quite the tricky maneuver.

It's not the end of the world, of course, but it means more laundry. I don't really prep for a golden shower as part of the changing ritual -- no plastic sheets or anything. Maybe I should?

Anyway, the shining moment in this story (and the reason for me posting this) was yesterday. I probably should feel bad about this but, alas, twenty-four hours later I'm still giggling. It was another standard poop filled diaper that I was cleansing from his buttocks and assorted boy parts -- if you've had a kid, you know exactly what I mean. That shit gets everywhere.

On this particular incident, I turned away for a moment to go throw away the diaper that I had just wrapped up. It was pretty full and needed to be somewhere other than on the changing surface. Out of nowhere and with great gusto, little Oliver started crying like only a very upset, startled, and angry baby can. Confused, since he normally doesn't start up the crocodile tears until the new diaper is going on, I turned back to see what was up.

Sure enough, the boy had decided to have another loose cannon incident. Unfortunately for him, though, this time the friendly fire was not on Daddy. Nope. This time, little Ollie managed to aim the cannon to attain a perfect bullseye. Poor kid managed to nail himself in the chest and face with his own warm surprise.

I managed to get him cleaned up and handed off to Ari for feeding before I collapsed in a helpless, giggling heap. I'm probably going to hell for this.