He calls it “elastic networking,” meaning your social graph is constantly updating based on use, proximity, and interaction. There are no friend requests on Color. There are no profiles. When you get nearby a fellow Color app user, he or she will automatically pop into your social circle, or “visual bulletin.” Depending on how much you interact with this person, Color will automatically adjust who shows up on the bulletin, and who does not. – Bill Nguyen via Fast Company
$41 million can buy you a lot of publicity.
In this case, $41 million in funding directed at the startup, Color.com. Nguyen thinks we need a whole new kind of social networking, one that requires no login, no password, no filters and apparently no ability to share past your mobile screen.
I downloaded the app last night and attempted to play with it, which, by the way, is impossible in a room all by yourself. The app only becomes even remotely useful if others in your immediate vicinity also have the app and also find the moment interesting enough to open the app and snap a photo. And, they have to be willing for that event to be just interesting enough to take a photo of, but not interesting enough anywhere but your phone, since the app, as of this writing, has no visible way of sharing the information anywhere but on your mobile device. There are several things wrong with that scenario.
Of course, Nguyen doesn’t think so. He adds, “When I go to a restaurant or public event or cafe, don’t I want to know some of these people around me?” Actually, I usually don’t. And I usually don’t care what they’re taking photos of. And I don’t care to share my photos with them.
You know what I care about? I care about my friends and what my friends are doing. And, unlike Nguyen, I don’t want to see the bad photos from their vacation. ” And I want to be able to look at those photos in more places than just my phone. Of Facebook, Nguyen says, “It’s become: Look at how amazing my vacation is, or look what great shape I’m in! It’s just become a highlight reel–and not real life anymore.” I almost spit out my tea when I read that.
Transparency is overrated.
If I take a photo at a cafe, I want to share it with my friends who aren’t there. But not if it’s a crappy photo. Call me crazy. The articles being written today hint at a future with Color that will involve tweeting. It better. It better involve some kind of sharing, for me anyway. I know they’re storing the photos somewhere, so there must be a plan. Or not. Hey, Nguyen got $41 million to execute on his plan. It must be amazing. Right?
So, despite my first reaction, I’m going to have the app loaded next week at RETech South. I’m going to coerce a few friends into downloading it as well and hope they don’t hate me for it later. Perhaps I’ll experience some conversion experience (it’s happened before), but right now, I’m not seeing how this will ever be more than a brief moment of internet hype for me.
Here’s an interesting twist I did not “get” in my playing and reading early, “what Colors does is offer up a visual public timeline of any given location, in real time. Every single image captured at any given location is instantly “placed” at that location, forever, and is served up as an artifact of that location to anyone using the Colors application.
Read more: http://battellemedia.com/archives/2011/03/why_color_matters_augmented_reality_and_nuanced_social_graphs_may_finally_come_of_age#ixzz1HXRE8VEc
More from John Batelle:
In short, if Color is used by a statistically significant percentage of folks, nearly every location that matters on earth will soon be draped in an ever-growing tapestry of visual cloth, one that no doubt will also garner commentary, narrative structure, social graph meaning, and plasticity of interpretation. Imagine if Color – and the fundaments which allow its existence – had existed for the past 100 years. Imagine what Color might have revealed during the Kennedy assassination, or the recent uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, or hell, the Rodney King beating?
Read more: http://battellemedia.com/archives/2011/03/why_color_matters_augmented_reality_and_nuanced_social_graphs_may_finally_come_of_age#ixzz1HXSQ7J00
What John Batelle sees and what Nguyen describes are two different things.
I’m still trying to imagine where $41 million worth of value might be?
Unread the same article in Fast Company and tried to dowload the app to my new Android device. I was unable to find the app in the Market so I gave up.
I did download Pegshot though. I have been coveting that app for a long time but there was no Blackberry version. Now that I have made the jump, I am really excited to start using it. See you next week in Atlanta 🙂
J
Well, if you can find the app on Android, join me at RETSO in testing it. Might as well play with it a bit and see what the guys giving up their millions see.
So far – all thumbs down. Then again I’m waiting to see how it works with a few other users. I see some potential for value and a great likelihood of floundered success. I am in an area where there are no less than 12,000 with a 1 mile radius so as work winds down perhaps others will join.
Meanwhile the app, on Android, is sparse, has crashed twice in 12 minutes and apparently has no menu … at all. It is either on or off. I suppose if I liked looking at myself I could have fun with it all alone. Still, I see opportunity for a connection tool. Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter … all started with just a couple of users. But $14,000,000?
I need Nguyen on my pitch team.
Well, I did finally locate the Twitter and Facebook links in the app. But I don’t know what message or link it sends out yet. And I’m not in a place I can test right now. I’m going to give it a try in a bit. 🙂
First yet only because you asked to called this: “Crazy!”
I just downloaded the app – whoa! Elvis and Marilyn Monroe showed up in my location! I’ll report back later about the details I learn.
Seriously, this appears to be a new twist in data mining. I can see why he got the big bucks if it proves out to successful….the investment will be a drop in the bucket. But I digress….
Ok, Marilyn says….
Its mighty lonely on its content down here…
I downloaded the app. And I’ll be at RETSO, ready to beat you senseless… 😉
Excellent.
Here’s one of Robert Scoble’s quotes about Color: “I wanna see that pitch deck. It must have had some magic unicorn dust sprinkled on it or something.” http://scobleizer.com/2011/03/24/why-colors-bad-first-experience-will-always-color-this-company-in-app-stores/
I’m in. I’m all about some creepy stalking stuff!
Sometimes you just want a like button on blog comments. 🙂
I’ll bring my old i-phone and my new Android and compare the two. Sounds like the platform doesn’t work nearly as well on the Droid, & hoping it doesn’t crash my phone.
They spent $41 million to only have it function well on the Apple platform though? #LAME
I’ll give it a shot. I’m into stalking.