What is the point of Color (Mark Hughes, screenwriter) | Hacker News Reader

What is the point of Color (Mark Hughes, screenwriter)

quora.com

18 pointshelwr21 comments

After installing COLOR on my phone and being linked to Some Dude And His Cat Somewhere A Couple Blocks Away, I realized what COLOR will become:

A total, complete, utter Cockshot Tsunami.

See: Chatroulette.

Unless they have some elegant Phallic Recognition And Elimination Algorithm (Phalgorithm?) much like facebook's nipple-liminator, they're about to unleash a $40,000,000.00 Dick Tractor Beam onto everybody's phone.

Here's a Phallic Recognition and Elimination Algorithm that will work for COLOR (but not for Chatroulette) (note: I am not endorsing this--just suggesting that this is what might develop naturally):

1. Girl in bar gets cocked on COLOR.

2. Girl shows this to slightly inebriated boyfriend in bar. He's had enough to drink to lower his judgement but not impair his ability to deliver an ass stomping, especially when he's got backup.

3. Boyfriend says to his buddies "hey, let's go find this ass".

4. Ass is located, and they explain why what he did was not polite. The explanation is done non-verbally.

5. Ass stops offering cock shots (assuming cock still attached).

6. We discover why COLOR needs all that money they just got--lawyers to defend against lawsuits from people like the ass, trying to blame COLOR for what happened to them after they posted their cock shots.

I can't decide if this is a brilliant piece of Gruberesque writing, snarky to the point where it just teeters on the brink of parody, or if this guy is for real.

This only happens in the movies.

I was convinced while I read it that it was a parody, something similar to the BIC ballpoint pen review on Amazon or the previous piece on quora, where someone explained the practical limitations of becoming Batman in real life. Then I look at the comments here and I see people discuss it as if it was serious. Now I am really confused.

As an outsider, both the Color product descriptions and the various reviews I've seen are indistinguishable from something produced by a random buzzword generator.

Given that he was previously asked if it's possible to become Batman in this day and age (http://www.quora.com/Given-our-current-technology-and-with-t...) , and he answered that in earnest as well, I think he's answering to the best of his ability here too.

The worst part, to me, about the mobility of photography technology and social media is that a lot of people feel a compulsion to experience everything through a medium. If they attend a concert, they must experience it by snapping photos or videos - they completely forget to enjoy and experience the music and atmosphere by themselves.

I don't know if this stems from some innate "collector's eagerness" human trait or a desire to document and immortalize everything for posterity, but a lot of people tend to forget to enjoy things on their own, in the very moment.

I don't know if this is a gimmick some people just are guilty up, and which hasn't been directly created by technology, but it's a shame that a lot of people don't stop for a minute and take in the entire experience without any intermediate lens. Try to enjoy the sight and sound of Niagara Falls, before you try to figure out how to crop the vista and when to upload it to Flickr.

There is always a balance. I do too little to document, and often find myself wishing I had something to remember an event by.

Sure there is. If you love photography, you obviously have to geek out, but I imagine that good photographers are also capable of turning photographer mode on and off.

And Mom needs to get a digital postcard at some point.

I dunno, maybe that's the way those people enjoy Niagara Falls.

it's a shame that a lot of people don't stop for a minute and take in the entire experience without any intermediate lens

My girlfriend used to complain like that about my habitual photography. Eventually, she noticed that my recall of all facets of events was far better than hers, which I directly attribute to the sharpening effect of thinking about framing, timing, etc.

Really? Color.com is going to help me avoid being crushed by a falling skyscraper? Really?

The point of Color is to extract money from the next set of idiots who invest. Or, exploit your privacy in a different way. Or both.

I think the point made in the answer was that the kind of passive social networking that Color is going to provide is a step beyond seeing a friend's facebook wall or twitter upload in the situation of a 'fire alarm' emergency.

These are going to be, for the most part, uploads by people unknown to you that will inform quickly and completely on a situation you cannot grasp as well alone.

In his September 11th example, perhaps you would see pictures from nearby of smoke and people moving away from it and gather enough information that you yourself will react as you will with a better sense of the world around you.

There was no skyscraper evasion skill mentioned in the answer. Really.

The author, Mark Hughes, is correct in his write-up and comes up with a few suggested scenarios where it would be "ideal". Unfortunately for Color those ideal situations where a critical mass makes the app useful are few and far between. How could Color have demonstrated themselves better? Maybe by launching a SXSW where a tech savvy and experimental crowd would give it a go, see the benefit, and continue on using it. Come to think about it, that is exactly what Twitter did. Now, imagine if twitter launched like Color did. You are posting with no followers, no one you knows sees any reason to use it so your feed is empty. Now add that you are anonymous, can't "follow" anyone, and wait until some random stranger in your vicinity post something but meanwhile your stream is empty. That's Color.

Oh, and as for the group event image sharing thing... didn't Posterous launch Events at SXSW? Yes they did (and for $41m less). http://blog.posterous.com/introducing-posterous-for-events-a...

It would be hard to come up with a vision of the future that freaks me out any more than that description.

I kept sincerely hoping this was extremely dry satire, but I think it's for real.

My favorite piece of ridiculous: "...you're in Time Square taking a photo of the M&M store, but everyone else has fed images to the experience network of the rabid grizzly bear running up the street behind you. Hmm, time to change your relationship to your surroundings right now, isn't it?"

Or maybe if I weren't navelgazing and taking pictures for a stupid "social network" I would be more aware of my surroundings?

Every use case he states for the "geolocated social network" is already served (and better served) by Twitter. Hey a skyscraper is falling. Someone is going to stop take a picture? Don't think so. They won't tweet while running either (probably), but what's more useful after the fact? A bunch of pictures of dust and random people running, or a text tweet that says "Hey something exploded"? The use cases here make no sense whatsoever.

Granted, I haven't read all of the critiques of Color, but here's my issue with camera apps: For any given moment, people are going to choose one app to document that moment. Are people going to start with Instagram, take a photo, switch to Color, take the same photo, then perhaps go to Path, and take it again? No. Apple et al needs to create a photography pipeline that apps can tap into and users can choose which apps are in that pipeline. Not an easy problem to solve given all of the capabilities, but worth trying.

I think we like to let our imagination and the vision of all the possibilities it brings us take reign, and that is good. Because of that, I can definitely throw a handful of monetary speculations into the air concerning this service.

To get this level of funding before even exploring the utility of these services just leaves me marveling, and suspicious.

It feels a little silly to be arguing/explaining this now - won't we know whether Color has a "point" over the next few months/years as it either succeeds/fails in the marketplace?

Color strikes me as the pets.com of 2011.

Once you go past the filtering (naked pictures) issue Color has a huge potential. I personally think if they tackle this one issue they will build something more powerful then Twitter (a snapshot is easier to take then writing 140 characters), Groupon (I can get deals just buy walking past a restaurant and looking at their photos), and many other big social startups. I hate to say this here, but I would bet on the idea. Now I am not even talking about social news. Can you imagine what this would mean for CNN and similar news outlet on breaking news. They can find and buy videos from all the guys capturing straight from the source.

In short color will be the most accurate way to answer "What's happening at?"

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