

Color: Breathlessly Overhyped Piece of Crap - danilocampos
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/03/24/color

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wallflower
I'm fascinated by this Photo-Sharing-is-tip-of-the-iceberg tidbit:

"A few feats of engineering brilliance hide under Color's slick surface. How
does the app determine who's in the same room with you? Not with GPS, which is
flummoxed by floors because it can't distinguish vertical distances between
people. So Nguyen's team taught Color to use a phone's lighting and audio
sensors, stitching their signals together with the sound and light
environments of nearby devices to determine which user is where--it's almost
like a bat's senses."

[http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0411/technology-photo-
app-...](http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0411/technology-photo-app-nguyen-
color-sequoia-eyes-of-world.html)

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tptacek
So... it's the _great photo sharing app of all time_ , then? Um, ok? $41MM?

When's the last time you had even the faintest urge to share a photo? I'm a
geek, and that urge hits maybe once every other week.

~~~
anigbrowl
I think his point is that the photo sharing is little more than a proof of
concept. The exciting thing is the automation of ad-hoc networking. The
internet collapses geography, but as a result it does a poor job of many tasks
at the local level - search for 'Bob's diner' and you may find that you're
just on the wrong side of the block, or you might get info on cheap flights to
some completely other city containing a more famous restaurant with the same
name.

The technology underlying Color seems like a much-needed metric for
establishing spatial (and by implication, temporal) relevance. An accurate and
behavior-based metric of relevance, as opposed to one based on self-selection
via search/signup, would be very, very easy to monetize. Say you're in the
fashion business. You could buy online ads to reach people who search for
fashion-related stuff online, but wouldn't you rather reach people who spend a
lot of time in the same places as your target demographic?

~~~
tptacek
You're selling the technology to me. It sounds interesting. But so was that
iPhone app that translated Spanish out of OCR'd video in real time, rendering
the results back in the correct perspective. Shouldn't the real-life Babelfish
be worth more --- and I mean, to the market --- than Color?

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joezydeco
So let's call Color the Rebecca Black of Web 2.0.

Too immature, too early to tell, too much attention out of nowhere, too much
momentum for too little effort. But it looks good, right?

~~~
konop
Rebecca Black is already profitable...

~~~
joezydeco
Nice one.

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zoowar
If you invited me over for diner and then pulled out a photo album, I would
leave. The concept is cool, but photo sharing is over hyped.

~~~
wallflower
Is photo sharing this generation's equivalent of the mandatory family
Kodachrome slide show?

~~~
zachrose
It's not a wheel. It's a carousel.

~~~
BoppreH
Quote from the scene <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2bLNkCqpuY>

An example of perfect marketing.

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mc2k
Could this be an "old boys' network" type of deal? Investing in it because one
of their other established investments is in line to purchase it? Is something
like that allowed? If it is, presumably it happens regularly.

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danilocampos
I'm reminded of the nerd response to iPad.

I don't have a dog in the hunt, but the idea behind Color is interesting. It
could crash and burn but I'll reserve judgment until I see normal people (non-
nerds) engaging with it.

Meanwhile, the vehemence is weird from everyone, especially Gruber. I wonder
if he would have posted the same entry if Color had a Lonely Sandwich video.

~~~
tptacek
The iPad is a computer that, as far as my mom is concerned, you never have to
boot, don't have to think about the operating system on, don't require
peripherals for, can stick in your purse, can tap 3-4 times to get install any
of 10's of thousands of applications, can tap 3-4 times to install any of
thousands of movies and TV shows on, and costs half of what a cheap laptop
cost only recently.

Can you inform me of the obvious potential of "Color" that I'm missing?
Because I also seriously don't get it. And: I like Instagram. But I don't
think it's the future or anything.

(Yes. They would have dodged this Daring Fireball post if Adam Lisagor had
done a video for them.)

~~~
ghshephard
It took me over a year before I "got" twitter. Now it would be hard to see how
I could replace it - tracking outages, ongoing event updates, what my friends
are up to, revolutions in Egypt - Heck, our company's public feed is actually
the best way for me to track what's happening at our company than our internal
mailing lists.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether there's any money in it. Everyone I
know uses AIM - but I don't know if AOL has ever been able to monetize that.

Regarding Color - I'll give it a bit of time, and see what I think after I go
to an event with groups of friends, and see what happens when we (and others)
are taking pictures.

~~~
Lewisham
This is a fair point, and one I hadn't considered. Bravo!

But, _getting_ Twitter doesn't mean Twitter pre-any-users-at-all was worth
investing $41m at a possible $80m valuation. It might still not be, as it has
no business plan to speak of.

I guess I'm naive, but I usually apply the "can (Facebook|Google|Big Company
of the Decade) copy this quickly?" as a measure for the value of a service,
but then again, it doesn't seem to apply for Place checkins (neither Facebook
nor Google seem to have made too much traction against FourSquare) nor
GroupOn. I guess that's why I'm not an investor :)

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vamsee
And his opinion is important why?

