Love it or loath it, the smartphone app Color is one of the most innovative Web products to have launched this year. It has a user experience that is as unique and different as Twitter was 5 years ago… I believe that Color has a very good chance of becoming a large scale success like Twitter. Certainly it’s funded to do so!” via Why Color May Be The Next Twitter.
I think the key word above is “chance.”
The conversation I’ve been having about Color with Matthew Shadbolt on Twitter had tapered off in the last few weeks. Last night he sent me the link to kick off the conversation again and it reminded me that I had not written a follow up post to my initial reaction to Color.com.
The week following the launch of Color.com was RETech South. And in the spirit of giving Color a fair chance, I was able to coerce a handful of friends to use Color on their iPhones and Androids at various locations around town. And I’ll say this; when it works, Color is a very slick app with some real sex appeal.
But I was coloring with friends.
The RETech South experience with Color was positive, but I feel strongly that it was positive because there were no strangers butting into our Color stream. And in the one and only instance where there was someone using color who was not part of our group, the photos they were taking didn’t feel additive to the experience, they felt like noise.
One evening at RETech South, about 40 of us ended up singing karaoke at a Korean karaoke joint. There were approximately 10 different private rooms. In our room, we were snapping photos throughout the night and having them all grouped together was nice. But if someone from another room had been using Color, their photos would have showed in our group. We would have been within 150 feet of each other, but not sharing the same experience at all. I don’t want their photos mixed in with our experience.
If I’m using Color to actively share photos of an event and I’m NOT there with a bunch of friends, I probably don’t care as much. In that moment, I’m just part of the larger crowd and might even enjoy the process of sharing the photos randomly. They all save to my phone, so I can share the best of them later with friends on Facebook or Twitter, so nothing is lost in that experience.
But if I’m at the same event with a large group of my friends, I really just want the group of photos I’m contributing to to be the ones that my friends and I have taken. In that instance, I don’t want to be coloring with strangers.
This is a major roadblock for me. I love the concepts being bantered about and the theoretical discussion of “elastic network” and “ambient social graph,” but in reality, I don’t really care about that ambient social graph. I care about my social graph. And I think there is a way for Color to live in both worlds. Give me the opportunity to create a group that only my friends can contribute to and I’m all over it. This is essentially what Foursquare is proposing with their version of photo sharing. That makes sense to me.
That’s my two cents. If you were at RETech South and joined in our little test, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Jeff as usual I am in agreement and you’ve touched on what I believe is the next wave of social…bringing it all back to the deeper, more meaningful connections. As is always the case the pendulum must swing back. I just read this blog yesterday on other apps that are doing just that: http://www.steverubel.com/the-validation-era
Deepest respect.
“Many of the conversations that influence buying decisions will become invisible to us, after years of being out in the open.” I think Rubel is right on target with that post.
I had a feeling you would 😉
After reading your post, I started to think – where is the value in having your non-friends and friends alike being grouped together like that? It does theoretically give you an opportunity to meet someone new, but in most cases you wind up tuning out the “noise.” thinking about that made me understand some of the discussions we’ve had about Foursquare from your view.
Where I do see the value is for the business or event. Let’s take RETechSouth as the example. Let’s say you had only 10 people you desired to interact with there (in a Color like setting), but 1000 people were using the app. Not so good for you, but it would give Brad Nix an excellent view of the event and how it’s going. That’s where I can see some value, but for you and your 10 friends (Jeff with only 10 friends – that’s funny), the experience would probably be too much.
Like you, Jeff, some of the concept intrigues me. I think investing seed money on attracting users may be a wise move. Opening a public beta on a global scale is bound to be filled with holes. Also having a larger listening channel than development scope seems to produce a better product. Okay – I am prognostibating so I’ll stop.
Ken, I agree. I like the fact that they have pushed out the product and are letting us tell them what works and what doesn’t work. If they are listening that is.