Best app store review ever
mike3k.posterous.com
mike3k.posterous.com
The thing is though, why do I need to jump through hoops to get meta-reviews?
The iTunes Store is displayed as web pages within a deficient browser (iTunes or the iOS app). It's the web stripped of its greatest utilities. Worldwide participation and annotation, extensibility, customizability etc.
Color is a ground-breaking new entry in the new genre of MMPRLMG (Massive Multi-Player Real-Live Marketing Games).
Imagine yourself emerging from the dense forest of the App Store(TM). In a clearing ahead you see a shiny new icon, a multicolor wheel. Its name is Color. In the distance you hear marketing dogs yelping buzz. "Social!" "Find Someone." "Party!" You press Install, and your adventure begins!
You tap the app and you're presented with your first challenge. The gatekeeper. You must enter you name and have your picture taken before you can continue. "What will my name be used for?" you ask. No response. "Who will see my picture?" Silence. "You must give us your name and image or you cannot proceed" the interface insists. You acquiesce, wondering if you haven't made your first mistake. But there's no going on until you do, and you WANT to go on.
You are whisked through a portal into a chamber. Along the border are strange icons. In the middle a large, jaunty, mural in the seat-pocket-emergency-evacuation-instructions drawing style. It shows intent people in pants all taking pictures with their phones. The capture reads "Take photos together."
You decide to explore the icons. One's sort of an infinity/Ying/Yang. You wonder what that's supposed to mean. You tap the icon and find yourself on a blank screen. The icon changes to overlapping ovals. What does this new icon mean? You tap that one. You return to the mural room.
You examine the third icon, clearly a clock. You tap it. You see your face, name, and the date. Nothing else. The clock icon is now lit up. You wonder what that means. You notice that questions are starting to accumulate. Should you be writing them down? You tap the clock icon again. It turns into a white screen with the words "No messages." The icon has turned into a sound-wave. You wonder what that means.
You continue to poke around the interface. There are no settings. No info buttin. No hints. You start to sweat a little. No tutorial. No about screen. No credits. No link to a website.
Then you remember the warning. The one written next to the install button. "Do not use Color alone!" You call up a friend. You both look at the interface together. There's no change.
Now things are getting spooky. Is this all there is? Is there no one to explain what these things are or how they work? Is this interface really so simple and obvious that it doesn't need any kind of guide? The though suddenly crosses your mind that you might not be technically savvy enough to understand an interface that's so simple it doesn't need a manual!
But this is a Real-Life Adventure game, and you have assists! You cast the Google spell. You discover that the developers spent months developing advanced analysis and data-mining technology. It analyzes location, and position, and light, and ambient noise, and bluetooth signal strength so it can... so it can... "What?" you ask out loud! "What on earth is it going to do with all of this informa..." and you shut your mouth. Is it listening now? Is it analyzing your level of frustration, the shaking in your hand, the defeated angle of the device? Is somewhere a database recording your inability to solve this twenty-first century enigma that you hold in you hand?
You find the company web site. It has no instructions. No "About us!" link. No tutorial, or feature lists, or forums, or support, or contacts, or FAQS. You can almost hear the developers laughing at you! "Silly user, sniffing around our website looking for information! We gather information, we don't give it out!"
You conquered Myst. You understood the end of Lost. You can do this!. You're not going to let this new adventure game genre get the best of you! You will master this if it takes all weekend. You discover a button to create a group! You wonder what a group is. Progress, of sorts.
But at least you know it's just a game, and not actually an app to share photos. And now you also know that you are along. And you're uncool. And not very clever. Because Color told you so.
Hm, that thought should have crossed my mind as well when first using Color. Guess I'm even less clever than the reviewer.
Anyway, version 1.0.2 just hit the market. It has "Welcome flow fixes", so at least they're working to improve it.
Seriously, has anyone figured out how to use color and found anything good of it? The reason we're all "piling on" is because NONE of us "get it".
The review may or may not be worth 100+ points on HN, but who am I to judge that. Better I start my own HN, so I can decide ... hey, that would actually work! Sort of.
I remember a time when being a nerd was really unfashionable. People would laugh at us. The word "geek" actually comes from circus parlance, it means someone who does disgusting things like bite the heads off of chickens for the entertainment of the crowd. Being called a "geek" meant being socially repulsive.
The usual dynamic was that somebody who wanted to establish themselves as an alpha would pick on a defenseless target--like a nerd--and engage in some old-fashioned shaming, sometimes with physical bullying thrown in for good measure.
Then the rest of the group would join in like the good little toadies that they were, each eager to prove that they're "in" to ensure that they aren't chosen as the next target.
Our luck changed when the Information Age accelerated. Our skills were in demand and we were able to build things that changed people's lives for the better. Some of us got stinking rich and helped others get filthy stinking rich. Being a nerd no longer meant being socially ostracized. Other people didn't point at us and laugh.
So what do we do with our new-found freedom from being the butt of everybody's jokes?
Well, it seems that sometimes we look within our own circle and point fingers at someone and laugh at them, joining in together in the fun of picking a victim and socially ostracizing them.
At times like this I feel that we haven't really changed the game, we've just moved the lines around a little and shuffled the jerseys.
EDIT: Don't confuse social ridicule with vanilla-flavored skepticism.
UPDATE: You added a point about skeptism after I replied. Well, simple skepticism would lead to one or two stories. They raised some money, their app doesn't work, their business plan is flawed. Ok, move along, nothing more to see here. The attention they're getting here on HN and the emotional investment people are pouring into this "skeptism" goes above and beyond what one would expect from dispassionate observation.
The tone and disproportionate representation suggests this is not just skepticism, but rather it's a social feeding frenzy. See the comment elsewhere about making fun of Colour for a week or two until it has jumped the shark: I think that author nailed it exactly, we are not expressing skepticism, we did that when it was first mentioned. We are now beating a dead horse for purely social reasons.
Second, it takes a certain kind of person to repeatedly slam a company that has no effect on their lives. If some hypothetical HN reader is criticizing Color constantly, then no amount of social grace will help them.
(The mind is a funny thing. It is the most powerful computing device we have encountered so far, yet it has a ridiculously primitive and broken tool chain with a debugger that hides or even lies about what's actually going on.)
http://thingist.com/t/item/4372/
It's kindof sad seeing this stuff. A lot of geeks do this beyond the scope of technology too. Get together with some geeks sometime and watch how they talk about the people around them. Everybody is stupid or a bro or a hipster. It's awful. You'd think that a group who spent out childhoods being made fun of would be nicer.
Flagged.
If there was one phrase that could describe virtually everything the web has touched, this would probably be it.
"What makes the desert beautiful, is that somewhere, it hides a well."--Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
I like funny threads too. I use http://reddit.com for that. That's a better place for this post and I would probably enjoy reading it here.
The question in my mind, that I believe is being addressed, is: Is Color a trojan horse big brother spying app looking like the next cool realworld-digital game?
If it is, that lines up with the review's experience of the app not understanding why they have to add their name and photo and why they can't find answers to their questions but feel pressured to just start taking pictures.
If it is, that also hints at the high startup valuation too.
Please do not ever use URL shorteners around here. Thanks!
It's not the fact that Libya is at war, it's the fact that it's a completely corrupt and brutal regime in "normal" times, and I especially don't trust them with my packet requests in these desperate times.