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Comment by crux | Hacker News Reader

'Say you walk into a restaurant with twenty people in it. You sit down at a table with four friends, and start chatting. Then one of your friends pulls out their phone, fires up Color, and takes a snapshot of you and your buddies.

That photo is now public to anyone within around 100 feet of the place it was taken. So if anyone else in the restaurant fires up Color, they’ll see the photograph listed in a stream alongside other photos that have recently been taken in the vicinity.'

Correct me if I'm wrong, but when it comes to photo sharing, aren't the people in your immediate vicinity at the time you take a photo the people who are going to be the least interested in getting that photo shared to them?

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I think you have a great point here. Other than documenting an event I cannot see any utility in sharing photographs with people in my immediate vicinity.

Well that really depends on how cute the people around you are and how much you'd like to contact them without you know, actually getting up and talking to them.

I can see the viral ad now:

Boy sees a cute girl but can't work up the guts to talk to her. Boy notices she's taking pictures with Color and writes: 'will you go out with me' on a paper napkin. Boy takes picture of the napkin with Color. Girl sees the message but ignores him. Boy secretly keeps the photos she shared longing for his lost love till he's an old man. Camera pulls back to show his grandkids using Color.

Fin.

Maybe at the exact moment, but generally look at pictures later to spark memories of places they were and things they did. The people who are around when the picture is taken are therefore most likely to want to see it again later.

I guess I don't know about you, but when my wife gets together with a bunch of her friends at a party or event, they snap ridiculous amounts of photos, which they then post on their facebook walls to share with each other. Really, this app just seems to take out the step of sharing on facebook and replace it with sharing with its own network comprised of local people.

Whether that is something people want remains to be seen.

Though I like what their doing from the perspective of trying to find a filter for which friends you're most often physically around, you point to what I think might be a big flaw.

Not only are people in the immediate vicinity less likely to need/want to view a copy of your photo, but will they take out their phone and launch the app to do that?

I can see wanting to see the photos you took when we were together, but I don't think I want to see them at the time the photo was taken, rather I'd want to see them at a later time.

I'm sure the photo aspect was just a foot-in-the-door thing to get them known and work out some of the more impressive tech on the back-end. I fully expect an api to your elastic network in the near future.

The premise is that we will be so busy looking at all these cool mobile apps on our phones that we do not even see what is going around us. The only way to find that out is using Colors!

Ha! The UI is so bad that you will spend the entire event trying to figure it out – missing the entire event. Then you HAVE to use Color to see what the hell happened.

Not really. Let's say you walk in a club at 1AM, you get to see what the party was like before you. Also clubs are usually concentrated in the same area, so you may also see what happening in the other establishments.

Do you really care at 1AM what the party in a club was an hour or two ago?

Not a good use case. Long shot.

Different perspectives can be valuable, if only to feed the narcissism of youth, but I have my doubts it will be enough to grow or sustain this thing.

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