Color.com Pivots to Live Personal Broadcasting | Hacker News Reader

Color.com Pivots to Live Personal Broadcasting

color.com

62 pointsrjbond3rd72 comments

Color doesn't do the greatest job explaining the new feature on their website...so let me explain a bit more (I've played with the app)

Basically Color's built a way to be a vouyer into your friend's world. You request to "visit" a friend via the iPhone app, and if they hit accept, it sends you a direct video feed of what they're seeing right now (no audio). It also posts that feed onto Facebook so any of their friends can see the feed. It can last as short or as long as you'd like.

When I tried it out, I got to see people in Paris, Las Vegas and SF in the span of three minutes. It was a surreal experience.

There are more details in the article we wrote ( http://mashable.com/2011/09/22/color-for-facebook/ ), but the essential point is that you don't have to use it -- your FRIENDS ask you to use it, and thus you use it to appease your friends. It's very voyeuristic and that leads to a lot of interesting conversations.

So this is a sort of next-step chat roullete, Only now you know who's penis you are watching ?

And you can share your favorite penises on Facebook!

Any idea why the lack of audio (besides the voyeury-creep factor audioless video grants)? This will be a perplexing omission for a lot of users who are already familiar with personal video chat apps like Tango/Oovoo/Google+ Hangouts et al.

probably because in a lot of states it's illegal to record audio without getting the person's permission first

This doesn't make much sense -- other audio/video sharing systems (GTalk / etc) would experience the same problem then.

I believe you are referring to the one-party / all-party telephone recording laws, where in some states all parties to the call must know the call is being recorded. This is not relevant for this software program (unless it is being used to stream audio from a phone call...)

But the "hosting" party must click Accept to begin recording, thus they'd know they themselves were being recorded. In addition, at this point, the onus is on the recorder (as they were likely instructed in the Terms of Service they accepted), not the app, to ensure that the folks they're recording agree to be on camera/recorded.

I'm pretty impressed that somebody would actually admit to writing for the digital rag known as Mashable. You are a brave soul, brotha!

Sounds like a weak attempt to stay somewhat relevant. No one will use this, just like the previous "color".

Okay, so you kissed up to Color's PR team, got access to the app early, participated in a carefully staged demo, and it seemed cool?

The problem here is that you have no incentive to tell us that Color sucks. Doing so means that you'll never get access to any previews or exclusives from them. Meanwhile, since we're just a bunch of anonymous nobodies, you can bullshit us about how Color's stupid idea about personal video broadcasting is "surreal."

We spent quite a while playing with live video broadcasting from mobile phones at Justin.tv. The fundamental problem is that your Facebook friends are very rarely sitting on their newfeed during the 2-3 minutes you happen to be broadcasting, so they miss your broadcast. We never fully solved this.

For example, after looking at the data from a few hundred thousand iPhone broadcasts, we noticed that over 90% of mobile phone broadcasts were viewed after the broadcast ended. Not quite the interactive experience we (or our users) hoped for. This is exactly why we built Socialcam.

Anyways, best of luck to the Color team. This is a difficult problem and I hope they manage to find an innovative way to solve it!

It works best for people with lots of followers- my (famous) friends do livestreams all the time ("watch me bake some cookies!") and have hundreds of people attend.

I see this as a transitional stepping stone towards a more videochat-enabled world. Color, or a similar app, adds video layer onto the tweet/FB status-style of broadcasting and sharing; it is the mass-social counterpart to what FaceTime is doing for phone calls.

Color:Facetime::Status update:Phonecall

Im confused by this pivot. What problem are they trying to solve? And for whom?

Americans don't really take vacations. When I'm on vacation, the point is to get away from everyone... not live-stream my vacation back to them.

The closest I get to their use case is video chatting with family. This is odd. Keep pivoting.

They are solving the problem "we have a company and an app that was super hyped and we still have money to spend! And, uh, facebook"

The problem i have with something like his is that i really want a fantastic video streaming service, or the ability to post photos from my phone better (i have never been able to post a photo to G+ from the iphone app - it just hangs) and i will never have a Facebook account.

Color to me seems washed out. I cannot see them being anything too amazing because it is reliant on facebook and has this weird voyeur model.

They are trying to hard.

It's more the Apple philosophy of "customers don't what they want till we show it to them", than solving a known problem. Personally I think it sounds like a probable hit.

With that $41m they got, not a whole has been achieved thus far. What is the problem they are trying to solve with this?

I mean, cool a broadcasting tool that i.e. Qik.com or Justin.tv already provides. It drains you battery, it drains you data plan. Unless you use WiFi, but other than that it is not really a app that will get you far.

When I go on vacation I use it for the peace and not to show my pleasurable moments with my friends. When I go to a concert, I go there for myself and not my friends. Plus the quality that gets pushed out is so bad, especially sound, it is better for them to wait for a Youtube upload than see and hear it from my crappy lit phone with bad microphone.

Just like others say, quit using the word pivot. And the website could use a video explaining, because reading it her e in a comment, MAKES ZERO SENSE!

Yes. You're quite correct. This application will be centered to places where data is cheap/free. Definitely not for Australians, New Zealanders etc.

With $41 million, you'd have thought they could execute anything. I thought everyone had a million ideas, but it all came down to execution...

In the US, unlimited data plans are in the $80+taxes range per month, where taxes add a significant amount. This makes the new Color a cutesy amusement to try out once and then delete.

That sound you hear is dumb money being lit on fire.

Actually, there's a lot of smart money in Color.

Hard to see it from where I'm sitting.

As evidenced by?

Do people really want to deal with draining the batteries of their phones to do "live broadcasting" to friends? On my last few vacations, I took pics with my phone, but I was more worried about keeping my battery alive than sharing stuff to friends.

Also, how do you convince people to use the color app to share on facebook instead of just using the camera or facebook app itself?

Disclaimer: I'm kinda anti-social when it comes to phone use, so I'm a bit biased. I also use a nexus one which has a fairly small battery compared to the iphone.

This is actually fairly interesting as a technology. What could you use this for?

1) I could imagine busy parents using this to watch their kids at sporting events.

2) People could use this to document crimes in progress. What's more effective, a can of Mace or an iPhone held up taking a picture of an attacker's face and streaming it to FB? [Probably the can of Mace in the short term, iPhone photo in the long term, and yes, you don't need Color for the still. But for documenting a crime in progress, easily pushing photo + live video to 700 friends is probably going to be as or more effective than calling the police.]

3) Instant web meetings and tours of distributed facilities. Say you run a few McDonald's franchises and want to check in on each one without driving over. Click the photo of each one and get a quick facility tour from a phone to get an estimate of foot traffic, demographics, atmosphere.

4) Events in progress are an obvious application. They tried something like this a few months ago with the Royal Wedding, but it's much more interesting when it's not "experience static photos of people near you" but rather "experience life through a video camera held up by a person far from you". This is because photos of the event are not novel for the few people that are near, but live video of the event is novel for the many people that are far.

5) If they ship this soon, I expect it to be used for people to vicariously experience the Occupy Wall Street thing...or else perhaps for Halloween and then New Year's Eve. With the right promotion they could also pitch this as a cost-saving tool to reunite families that can't afford to travel on Thanksgiving/Christmas.

Just some musings...

Doesn't work on firefox with: "FB is not defined"

On the bright side, all the JS is not obfuscated, and is quite an interesting read:

http://www.color.com/static/1064/lib/ext/jquery-class.js

http://www.color.com/static/1064/app/common/App.js

http://www.color.com/static/1064/app/pages/Browse/Browse.js

http://www.color.com/static/1064/app/pages/Visit/Visit.js

http://www.color.com/static/1064/app/pages/Profile/Profile.j...

http://www.color.com/static/1064/app/pages/Me/Me.js

The style in these is atrocious. Useless commented out code all over the place, typos everywhere ("fede" for "feed", "depdencenies" for "dependencies"), etc.

A sign they are outsourcing their latest core competency?

"if (this.moreCount > 5) return; // we only allow a max of 5. TODO: what happens then?"

Are you sure you don't have a Facebook blocking extension installed? You'll get "FB is not defined" if you do.

Well, that's interesting if Facebook server fails to deliver you the javascript API files, Color.com will only display you an empty page. Their application initial load depends at a 100% on an external website on which they have no control. If facebook has a downtime for that file, nobody can load their application. That's sounds like an awful idea.

Thanks for noticing. Yes, my adblock is configured not to allow facebook to get my surfing data. Disabling allows color.com to open on FF just fine.

I think the main problem of Color's products is the motivation behind them. Bill Nguyen seems to design their products (2 so far) on going after money in the social space not a deeper, more organic need. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Foursquare had founders who were intertwined/empathic to the problem their products solve. Nguyen strikes me as an armchair social analyst - analyzing the social space without using, understanding it deeply. But this impression is based only on a few interviews and Color's movements.

Rant: When a company Pivots, a developer gets it's wings. There are no rules to raising money anymore, no path. I don't care what a VC tells me. It invalidates VC funding models, otherwise Color should not exist. They could create a fund with the money they have in the bank. At least that would make sense.

e.g. - No reason not to bootstrap.

I think the word pivot is over-used. When I think of a person pivoting, I see someone more or less in the same place but facing a different direction. A company that pivots does the same, but changing the product completely isn't a pivot by a leap. Not saying that's bad, but it isn't the same as exploring a particular product space by trying different variations within it.

You're right, but I think pivoting is a failure to admit defeat on many levels; from vc investment to execution. If I was in whatever Fund that invested in Color, I'd be pissed the f off.

Out of any given day I'd say there's < 5% that anybody might be interested in seeing, and far less that I'd be interested in sharing. An app like this might be well suited for people whose friends spend their lives going from one AirBNB apartment to another, but the odds that the moment someone requests a peek into my world lines up nicely with something I'd willing to share is virtually nil. Maybe I'm old and "kids-these-days" will gravitate more towards this kind of thing ... but it's not even close to something I'd be interested in.

Basically, Color.com just pivoted to Facetime.

Why on earth:

1) Does the Facebook blocker block the page from anything to load. Weird. 2) Does Color.com ask for SO many permission. I mean allow Color may mark notifications as read?

Why? Am I missing something?

This is what color.com looks like to me (Chrome 14 with adblock):

http://cl.ly/3G1T0I2K0k3m2u3D2Z1I

Not made for people with adblockers, I guess.

Same here. It's lacking a bit of... Color.

The Facebook blocker isn't to blame here. It's sloppy JavaScript programmers who assume that the FB global variable will always be initialised and available to their other scripts. If they bulletproof their access to FB, the rest of their site wouldn't break for paranoid visitors.

Ok so maybe I'm just cranky tonight but... Color me sick of the word "pivot".

Pivoting = failure, trying idea #2.

There is no shame in this, but trying to wrap it in a term that implies that it was part of the plan all along and everything is just peachy is disingenuous.

I give "pivot" a few months before it is a synonym for "failure". As in "I was trying to hit on that girl but she shot me down so I pivoted to the girl next to her."

Their site only shows a blank page if you have Facebook's domains blocked through AdBlock Plus.

Yeah, this is weird. I guess it waits for some kind of response from Facebook before loading the page, or something.

I've never understood what problem color.com is trying to solve. They seem to have been in the photo sharing business before, but that problem seemed solved to me. I had a range of options how/where I wanted to share my photos. Those all had apps designed to make that process fairly easy. I'm not sure what the pain point was, they were trying to solve.

Live personal broadcasting also seems like an already solved problem. I understand they have money in the bank and need to try to find a competitive area, but I just don't understand the strategy here.

Color.com put together a great team, but markets that don't exist, don't care how great your team is.

You probably would have said the same before instagram appeared on the scene.

Live personal broadcast is far from a solved problem. To give an example, when's the last time you saw a private wedding live-streamed ? - it's a perfect example of a private event which has people who want to watch it online, yet it's something that's rarely done.

Instagram solved the problem of sterile looking mobile photos. Most people taking mobile photos are amateurs, and can use any help they can get to make their photos look better. That's why instagram succeeds. There's a lot of people who want their mobile photos to magically look better (or at least look more like instagram style photos).

Ustream and Qik have made live video sharing easy. The fact that most people aren't familiar with either is because there isn't much demand for live video broadcasting. I don't see push vs pull as being any kind of differentiator here. It was already trivial to ask someone to live broadcast an event (text messaging is ubiquitous) or to watch one in progress.

Seems like a really cool feature, however I can't see myself ever actually using it. Whats it for? Like what scenarios are they envisioning me using this for?

Maybe I'm missing something.

One use case might be concerts: People already call friends so they can listen, this way they could add video too.

Ah, makes sense. But a concert is soo loud and there are so many people bumping into you that you could never get any video quality on your phone that would make me want to watch , and actually enjoy watching. Ever seen a iphone video of a friend showing you their view at a concert? Horrible lol.

Not for me I guess

I like that use case, but if it works over facebook how do you notify people immediately that this cool thing is happening? Do you text them, saying "check my facebook right now", then wait for them to click the link there to notify you to start broadcasting?

I could be wrong, maybe more people do facebook notifications but I haven't met anyone that has em setup.

One way I can see it making sense is the logical next step in sharing holiday experiences. More and more direct.

I could see using this during a vacation when I'm separated from my spouse for a short time. I'm going shopping for groceries and she takes a short walk, and we can still stay connected, she shows me the landscape and I ask her what she thinks of that cereal. Or me in a shopping center, looking for a new camera/whatever, and she shows me what kind of dress she thinks of buying in a totally different store. These kinds of "still connected, but following our own paths"

I don't know if it's going to be successful. What if I rather be there in person? What if this sort of semi-connection is not compelling and feels like making life one dimension shorter? Who knows, but it's a far cry from useless.

Just reposting this to see it from their perspective: Color Founder Bill Nguyen Explains Why You're All Wrong -- It Really IS A $41 Million Idea: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-03-25/tech/30098095...

Sounds quite like qik.com

or justin.tv

Justin.tv is about public broadcasting, not private.

It does both if you password your streams.

It's too bad. Looks like Color is going down. Their initial idea of "location based social networks" (through the use of mobile phone data) would have been much more profitable in the long run and probably lead to some interesting services. Their initial execution sucked but their "big idea" had potential.

Actually, I expect every Color pivot (including this one) to be a trojan horse to execute the original big idea. The invite mechanism via FB is still "take a picture" and post to FB, so the implicit network is still being built.

The truth to the question "what problem does this solve?" is a constant for this company: "this" solves our problem of trying to get a critical mass of users to take metadata-rich pictures all over the world.

What problem does this solve? If they (color.com) think they've got a (new) USP then they really need to shout about it in a way that immediately tells you why it is useful.

Facebook could shut this down in a heartbeat by rolling their own live-streaming service.

they should just hire josh harris

There has to be a strategy here. Either they are incredibly intelligent and not disclosing this strategy or they are banking on mass downloads to figure it out in real time?.. Either way this is going to be a great case study for business to-do's or dont's.

Why does there have to be a strategy? Individuals and organizations can and do make (rationally) inexplicable decisions devoid of strategic thinking.

They should save their investors money and pivot out of existence.

I haven't used it, but I suppose it's an interesting concept. What starts out as broadcasting random nonsense could evolve in to individuals broadcasting a produced show on fb. Sort of how podcasting evolved - with a social twist.

What on earth makes them think I would let them post as myself among other things that should have nothing to do with receiving an invitation.

Services should really pay more attention to the permissions they request.

Loads a nice fat blank white page in Chrome. Works in a private windows. It's not ABP and it's not Disconnect. It's just one thing after another with these guys.

I'm hearing a lot about color but all I got so far is a few landing page baiting. And please stop using the word pivot for no reason.

For 'no reason'? This is a legit use. They did pivot.

pivot

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