Just because you have access to the pictures does not mean you must consume/view them immediately. If many folks are taking pics, I might want to glance every once in a while at what might be going up on FB tomorrow (people, especially women, are very socially conscious, and FB has become the de facto personal brand management tool).

Or if I know someone is closer to the action. Or someone took a picture of me and my wife, or a bunch of people took a bunch of pictures in a group shot. At the game someone might have better seats, at school teenagers could go to town with this.

I think they had a great idea that helped them get $141 million from some of the biggest names in the VC world, but bungled execution badly.

This isn't necessarily true.

Have you seen how much people spend, and how much trouble they go to for wedding photos?

Wedding photos are still admired after the fact. There still isn't a use case for "hmm, I wonder what images people are taking within a 100' radius of me!".

There is a use case for, "I wonder what images were taken within 100' of me!"

If the app is on, and tracking photos that were taken, then can resolve it after the fact (and get those photos), I think a lot of people would be interested.

Wouldn't that be in Facebook's territory? i.e., "Hey Facebook, I took these pictures at Bob's wedding. Based on the geotag, can you show me other pictures from nearby at the same time?"

It seems convoluted (not to mention a gigantic drag on your battery life) to do so on each and every device in real-time.

Not quite the use case I was considering.

Your phone knows where you were, when. And says, "Here is where I was, what pictures were taken around me?" I want this information regardless of whether I was personally taking pictures.

Keeping a history of where you are can be done without much drain on your battery life. It can just log a location every few minutes.

Is location really the key piece of data differentiating "pictures from Bob's wedding" from "the universe of pictures", though? I would think some concept of tagging that went beyond mere location would be far more useful.

80% of the time (walking down the street, sitting in my office, etc.), I don't care about pictures that were taken around me. For the 1% of the time that I DO care, I can probably easily name the thing that I want to see pictures of. Location is perhaps a handy filter for "tags that might be important to me", but it's hardly the sole determiner, or even a major factor, in whether any given picture will be one that's interesting to me.

The point is that if you, say, go to a conference, you want to see the random pictures that strangers snapped which you might be in.

And what is the chance that random stranger is using Color? 0.000001%. So why don't you just walk over there and ask him to send you a copy? Social networking at its finest, in real time, at a conference.

But typically those are taken with SLRs, which still take better pictures than phones or point & shoots, especially in low light. Plus they are still the only way (with a big lens) to get the shallow depth of field that people like.

Taken on phone cameras?

I have a phone camera and a fairly nice, if not exactly pro, DSLR. I'd never consider taking anything remotely important on the phone; the quality difference is enormous.