buzz

Color: A photo app truly worthy of our new cameras

http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/23/color-looks-to-reinvent-social-interaction-with-its-mobile-photo-app-and-41-million-in-funding/

For those too lazy to read it, Color is a photo app, where all the content is public and the primary way of interacting with content and people is location. I’m really not doing it justice here but I don’t want to quote the whole TechCrunch article so check that out and you can find a richer explanation.

So I’m really excited about this app for a number of reasons. First, it’s audacious. This app isn’t like any of the current “social photo” apps. That’s going to be a little bit challenging for adoption, but God help me, I do love a bold plan.

It’s sad that at this point LBS is such a cliche. Mobile and location have been buzzy for a while for their own sakes but Color tries to realize some of that promise. Most social photo apps are the equivalent of analog cameras with social and location bolted on. You can add friends and see their photos. You can encode the photos with location so that you can see them on a map or access it later. But these are really just adding new features to old thinking.

Photos organized by location are far more interesting than text, which is most of what has been tried up until now. Viewing twitter updates or even a yobongo discussion can be hit and miss. Just because we share location doesn’t mean we necessarily share the same topic. You could sit right beside me and talk about people and events that I don’t know and/or don’t care about. If we are, however, sharing physical space, a photo of yours is at least going to be close to what I’m interested in.

Color is an app that couldn’t have existed before pervasive smartphone usage and leverages that. It’s not just a camera you carry all the time. It’s a device complete with a vast array of sensors that can capture and share media. Making the location the organizing principle and deriving my social graph with that data really do the device justice.

I want to use this app.

Now, I’ll also say that I like the current flock of social photo apps for what they are. Filters are fun. I’ve enjoyed consuming and sharing unique scenes and images. I like what Path is doing as well with their experimentation around group dynamics and what social means.

It’s clear that this rev of the app isn’t the end all be all of this dream. I like the vision and the direction but no one is saying this current release can’t be improved. I’ll be particularly interested in how they overcome the cold-start issues. This isn’t an app with a 1-player mode at all. This is going to be absolutely magical once all of my friends are on it but before that… That’s a really tough nut to crack and I haven’t seen in the current incarnation of the app any features that draw in new users.

I’m looking forward to the future of this app and also seeing this thinking cascade out to other tools.