Color is Surprisingly Innovative But Will Still Fail

This application made me feel dumb. I downloaded it to my Droid. It asked me for my name. Then it asks me to take a self-portrait, I do it, it shows the picture, I click OK. It goes back to the camera UI ready to take another picture. Uh? OK, I repeat this a couple of times until I quit the application.

I give it another try. I open the app. It now it shows my name and the colorful shutter. I click the shutter, I take a picture, it shows the picture and the options [cancel] and [ok]. I click [ok]. It shows the camera UI again ready to take more pictures. No indication on what is happening. I click cancel and I get a completely white screen.

I wanted to at least see what was the big fuzz about this app but I feel like for a pretty savvy person like me to feel this frustrated is not a good way to start. Maybe the iOS version is easier to use.

I still think it's going to fail because they've made it clear, before a user base has been 'hooked', that their main focus is data mining. Usually users are getting utility before they're aware of the privacy issues, and at that point they're willing to give up that privacy. Becoming a Color user means giving up your privacy to get non-existent utility (because of the issues of relying on scale which the article talks about); maybe the utility would be there if everyone were using the app, but from a game theory perspective, the optimal behavior for each potential user is to not adopt the app (so long as everyone else hasn't already).

I am kind of hoping Color takes off, becomes awesome, and is used everywhere just because of all the bad crap being written about it.

It's clear that the popular thing to do is rag on the first launched concept, and yet everyone still seems to be ignoring the team. I doubt Sequoia, bubble times or not, is likely to back a buzzword friendly concept if they didn't believe the team could make it into something worth a multiple or the $41M investment. I'd say it's a little early to judge whether the concept or the product will take off, but I think the team will build and iterate Color into something valuable.

I think everyone's overestimating the importance of traction. If they have the technology to monetize a large user base better than anyone else can, and they have the technology to improve a large user base's experience in ways that no one else can, it doesn't matter if they have a largeuser base, because other people do, and those same people have tons of money.

"Even with the ever-increasing prominence of iPhones and Androids, it is exceedingly unlikely that you'll be at a location where multiple people own those phones, have downloaded color, and are using the app at that precise moment"

The only hard part is getting people to install it. Once it is installed push notifications or constant polling in the background can tell you when others nearby are using it -- I imagine a combination of fine GPS, WiFi SSID comparisons, and cell tower IDs would fine tune it. Of course, not being a mobile developer I don't know whether the last two are even obtainable by a third-party app.

Given geotargeted ads, such as Google AdWords, it takes flooding a city, or a district, with ads for an hour to create an impression of high saturation.

They could make deals to pre-install the app on handsets, perhaps.