

Color.com Pivots to Live Personal Broadcasting - rjbond3rd
http://www.color.com/

======
Mystalic
Color doesn't do the greatest job explaining the new feature on their
website...so let me explain a bit more (I've played with the app)

Basically Color's built a way to be a vouyer into your friend's world. You
request to "visit" a friend via the iPhone app, and if they hit accept, it
sends you a direct video feed of what they're seeing right now (no audio). It
also posts that feed onto Facebook so any of their friends can see the feed.
It can last as short or as long as you'd like.

When I tried it out, I got to see people in Paris, Las Vegas and SF in the
span of three minutes. It was a surreal experience.

There are more details in the article we wrote (
<http://mashable.com/2011/09/22/color-for-facebook/> ), but the essential
point is that you don't have to use it -- your FRIENDS ask you to use it, and
thus you use it to appease your friends. It's very voyeuristic and that leads
to a lot of interesting conversations.

~~~
Murkin
So this is a sort of next-step chat roullete, Only now you know who's penis
you are watching ?

~~~
pork
And you can share your favorite penises on Facebook!

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kvogt
We spent quite a while playing with live video broadcasting from mobile phones
at Justin.tv. The fundamental problem is that your Facebook friends are very
rarely sitting on their newfeed during the 2-3 minutes you happen to be
broadcasting, so they miss your broadcast. We never fully solved this.

For example, after looking at the data from a few hundred thousand iPhone
broadcasts, we noticed that over 90% of mobile phone broadcasts were viewed
after the broadcast ended. Not quite the interactive experience we (or our
users) hoped for. This is exactly why we built Socialcam.

Anyways, best of luck to the Color team. This is a difficult problem and I
hope they manage to find an innovative way to solve it!

~~~
hammock
It works best for people with lots of followers- my (famous) friends do
livestreams all the time ("watch me bake some cookies!") and have hundreds of
people attend.

I see this as a transitional stepping stone towards a more videochat-enabled
world. Color, or a similar app, adds video layer onto the tweet/FB status-
style of broadcasting and sharing; it is the mass-social counterpart to what
FaceTime is doing for phone calls.

Color:Facetime::Status update:Phonecall

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sudonim
Im confused by this pivot. What problem are they trying to solve? And for
whom?

Americans don't really take vacations. When I'm on vacation, the point is to
get away from everyone... not live-stream my vacation back to them.

The closest I get to their use case is video chatting with family. This is
odd. Keep pivoting.

~~~
samstave
They are solving the problem "we have a company and an app that was super
hyped and we still have money to spend! And, uh, facebook"

The problem i have with something like his is that i really want a fantastic
video streaming service, or the ability to post photos from my phone better (i
have never been able to post a photo to G+ from the iphone app - it just
hangs) and i will never have a Facebook account.

Color to me seems washed out. I cannot see them being anything too amazing
because it is reliant on facebook and has this weird voyeur model.

They are trying to hard.

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dbuizert
With that $41m they got, not a whole has been achieved thus far. What is the
problem they are trying to solve with this?

I mean, cool a broadcasting tool that i.e. Qik.com or Justin.tv already
provides. It drains you battery, it drains you data plan. Unless you use WiFi,
but other than that it is not really a app that will get you far.

When I go on vacation I use it for the peace and not to show my pleasurable
moments with my friends. When I go to a concert, I go there for myself and not
my friends. Plus the quality that gets pushed out is so bad, especially sound,
it is better for them to wait for a Youtube upload than see and hear it from
my crappy lit phone with bad microphone.

Just like others say, quit using the word pivot. And the website could use a
video explaining, because reading it her e in a comment, MAKES ZERO SENSE!

~~~
veb
Yes. You're quite correct. This application will be centered to places where
data is cheap/free. Definitely not for Australians, New Zealanders etc.

With $41 million, you'd have thought they could execute anything. I thought
everyone had a million ideas, but it all came down to execution...

~~~
pork
In the US, unlimited data plans are in the $80+taxes range per month, where
taxes add a significant amount. This makes the new Color a cutesy amusement to
try out once and then delete.

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jfb
That sound you hear is dumb money being lit on fire.

~~~
smoody
Actually, there's a lot of smart money in Color.

~~~
elq
As evidenced by?

------
ramanujan
This is actually fairly interesting as a technology. What could you use this
for?

1) I could imagine busy parents using this to watch their kids at sporting
events.

2) People could use this to document crimes in progress. What's more
effective, a can of Mace or an iPhone held up taking a picture of an
attacker's face and streaming it to FB? [Probably the can of Mace in the short
term, iPhone photo in the long term, and yes, you don't need Color for the
still. But for documenting a crime in progress, easily pushing photo + live
video to 700 friends is probably going to be as or more effective than calling
the police.]

3) Instant web meetings and tours of distributed facilities. Say you run a few
McDonald's franchises and want to check in on each one without driving over.
Click the photo of each one and get a quick facility tour from a phone to get
an estimate of foot traffic, demographics, atmosphere.

4) Events in progress are an obvious application. They tried something like
this a few months ago with the Royal Wedding, but it's much more interesting
when it's not "experience static photos of people near you" but rather
"experience life through a video camera held up by a person far from you".
This is because photos of the event are not novel for the few people that are
near, but live video of the event is novel for the many people that are far.

5) If they ship this soon, I expect it to be used for people to vicariously
experience the Occupy Wall Street thing...or else perhaps for Halloween and
then New Year's Eve. With the right promotion they could also pitch this as a
cost-saving tool to reunite families that can't afford to travel on
Thanksgiving/Christmas.

Just some musings...

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seltzered_
Do people really want to deal with draining the batteries of their phones to
do "live broadcasting" to friends? On my last few vacations, I took pics with
my phone, but I was more worried about keeping my battery alive than sharing
stuff to friends.

Also, how do you convince people to use the color app to share on facebook
instead of just using the camera or facebook app itself?

Disclaimer: I'm kinda anti-social when it comes to phone use, so I'm a bit
biased. I also use a nexus one which has a fairly small battery compared to
the iphone.

------
DanielRibeiro
Doesn't work on firefox with: "FB is not defined"

On the bright side, all the JS is not obfuscated, and is quite an interesting
read:

<http://www.color.com/static/1064/lib/ext/jquery-class.js>

<http://www.color.com/static/1064/app/common/App.js>

<http://www.color.com/static/1064/app/pages/Browse/Browse.js>

<http://www.color.com/static/1064/app/pages/Visit/Visit.js>

[http://www.color.com/static/1064/app/pages/Profile/Profile.j...](http://www.color.com/static/1064/app/pages/Profile/Profile.js)

<http://www.color.com/static/1064/app/pages/Me/Me.js>

~~~
ootachi
The style in these is atrocious. Useless commented out code all over the
place, typos everywhere ("fede" for "feed", "depdencenies" for
"dependencies"), etc.

~~~
shaggyfrog
A sign they are outsourcing their latest core competency?

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twidlit
I think the main problem of Color's products is the motivation behind them.
Bill Nguyen seems to design their products (2 so far) on going after money in
the social space not a deeper, more organic need. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr,
Instagram, Foursquare had founders who were intertwined/empathic to the
problem their products solve. Nguyen strikes me as an armchair social analyst
- analyzing the social space without using, understanding it deeply. But this
impression is based only on a few interviews and Color's movements.

------
dustineichler
Rant: When a company Pivots, a developer gets it's wings. There are no rules
to raising money anymore, no path. I don't care what a VC tells me. It
invalidates VC funding models, otherwise Color should not exist. They could
create a fund with the money they have in the bank. At least that would make
sense.

e.g. - No reason not to bootstrap.

~~~
Mvandenbergh
I think the word pivot is over-used. When I think of a person pivoting, I see
someone more or less in the same place but facing a different direction. A
company that pivots does the same, but changing the product completely isn't a
pivot by a leap. Not saying that's bad, but it isn't the same as exploring a
particular product space by trying different variations within it.

~~~
dustineichler
You're right, but I think pivoting is a failure to admit defeat on many
levels; from vc investment to execution. If I was in whatever Fund that
invested in Color, I'd be pissed the f off.

------
uptown
Out of any given day I'd say there's < 5% that anybody might be interested in
seeing, and far less that I'd be interested in sharing. An app like this might
be well suited for people whose friends spend their lives going from one
AirBNB apartment to another, but the odds that the moment someone requests a
peek into my world lines up nicely with something I'd willing to share is
virtually nil. Maybe I'm old and "kids-these-days" will gravitate more towards
this kind of thing ... but it's not even close to something I'd be interested
in.

------
jason_tko
Basically, Color.com just pivoted to Facetime.

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tuhin
Why on earth:

1) Does the Facebook blocker block the page from anything to load. Weird. 2)
Does Color.com ask for SO many permission. I mean allow Color may mark
notifications as read?

Why? Am I missing something?

~~~
moe
This is what color.com looks like to me (Chrome 14 with adblock):

<http://cl.ly/3G1T0I2K0k3m2u3D2Z1I>

Not made for people with adblockers, I guess.

~~~
ElbertF
Same here. It's lacking a bit of... Color.

------
jasonkolb
Ok so maybe I'm just cranky tonight but... Color me sick of the word "pivot".

Pivoting = failure, trying idea #2.

There is no shame in this, but trying to wrap it in a term that implies that
it was part of the plan all along and everything is just peachy is
disingenuous.

I give "pivot" a few months before it is a synonym for "failure". As in "I was
trying to hit on that girl but she shot me down so I pivoted to the girl next
to her."

------
gs7
Their site only shows a blank page if you have Facebook's domains blocked
through AdBlock Plus.

~~~
adeelk
Yeah, this is weird. I guess it waits for some kind of response from Facebook
before loading the page, or something.

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viscanti
I've never understood what problem color.com is trying to solve. They seem to
have been in the photo sharing business before, but that problem seemed solved
to me. I had a range of options how/where I wanted to share my photos. Those
all had apps designed to make that process fairly easy. I'm not sure what the
pain point was, they were trying to solve.

Live personal broadcasting also seems like an already solved problem. I
understand they have money in the bank and need to try to find a competitive
area, but I just don't understand the strategy here.

Color.com put together a great team, but markets that don't exist, don't care
how great your team is.

~~~
ig1
You probably would have said the same before instagram appeared on the scene.

Live personal broadcast is far from a solved problem. To give an example,
when's the last time you saw a private wedding live-streamed ? - it's a
perfect example of a private event which has people who want to watch it
online, yet it's something that's rarely done.

~~~
viscanti
Instagram solved the problem of sterile looking mobile photos. Most people
taking mobile photos are amateurs, and can use any help they can get to make
their photos look better. That's why instagram succeeds. There's a lot of
people who want their mobile photos to magically look better (or at least look
more like instagram style photos).

Ustream and Qik have made live video sharing easy. The fact that most people
aren't familiar with either is because there isn't much demand for live video
broadcasting. I don't see push vs pull as being any kind of differentiator
here. It was already trivial to ask someone to live broadcast an event (text
messaging is ubiquitous) or to watch one in progress.

------
Jsarokin
Seems like a really cool feature, however I can't see myself ever actually
using it. Whats it for? Like what scenarios are they envisioning me using this
for?

Maybe I'm missing something.

~~~
m__
One use case might be concerts: People already call friends so they can
listen, this way they could add video too.

~~~
seltzered_
I like that use case, but if it works over facebook how do you notify people
immediately that this cool thing is happening? Do you text them, saying "check
my facebook right now", then wait for them to click the link there to notify
you to start broadcasting?

I could be wrong, maybe more people do facebook notifications but I haven't
met anyone that has em setup.

------
Joakal
Just reposting this to see it from their perspective: Color Founder Bill
Nguyen Explains Why You're All Wrong -- It Really IS A $41 Million Idea:
[http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-03-25/tech/30098095...](http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-03-25/tech/30098095_1_share-
photos-social-networking-app)

------
seikatsu
Sounds quite like qik.com

~~~
kordless
or justin.tv

~~~
ig1
Justin.tv is about public broadcasting, not private.

~~~
51Cards
It does both if you password your streams.

------
melvinram
It's too bad. Looks like Color is going down. Their initial idea of "location
based social networks" (through the use of mobile phone data) would have been
much more profitable in the long run and probably lead to some interesting
services. Their initial execution sucked but their "big idea" had potential.

~~~
saddino
Actually, I expect every Color pivot (including this one) to be a trojan horse
to execute the original big idea. The invite mechanism via FB is still "take a
picture" and post to FB, so the implicit network is still being built.

The truth to the question "what problem does this solve?" is a constant for
this company: "this" solves our problem of trying to get a critical mass of
users to take metadata-rich pictures all over the world.

------
arctangent
What problem does this solve? If they (color.com) think they've got a (new)
USP then they really need to shout about it in a way that immediately tells
you why it is useful.

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powertower
Facebook could shut this down in a heartbeat by rolling their own live-
streaming service.

------
draggnar
they should just hire josh harris

------
dotmatrix
There has to be a strategy here. Either they are incredibly intelligent and
not disclosing this strategy or they are banking on mass downloads to figure
it out in real time?.. Either way this is going to be a great case study for
business to-do's or dont's.

~~~
jfb
Why does there have to be a strategy? Individuals and organizations can and do
make (rationally) inexplicable decisions devoid of strategic thinking.

------
gavanwoolery
They should save their investors money and pivot out of existence.

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dr_
I haven't used it, but I suppose it's an interesting concept. What starts out
as broadcasting random nonsense could evolve in to individuals broadcasting a
produced show on fb. Sort of how podcasting evolved - with a social twist.

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rane
What on earth makes them think I would let them post as myself among other
things that should have nothing to do with receiving an invitation.

Services should really pay more attention to the permissions they request.

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drivebyacct2
Loads a nice fat blank white page in Chrome. Works in a private windows. It's
not ABP and it's not Disconnect. It's just one thing after another with these
guys.

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mnml_
I'm hearing a lot about color but all I got so far is a few landing page
baiting. And please stop using the word pivot for no reason.

~~~
evertonfuller
For 'no reason'? This is a legit use. They did pivot.

