New Color.com | Hacker News Reader

New Color.com

color.com

20 pointsbretthellman43 comments

Wow! Video without audio, and I have to join to watch! They've just invented a less interesting Youtube, without audio, and non-public access. Well done on an ... interesting ... pivot.

EDIT: this one is for the files of social networks that hobble a feature of other networks to try and stand out. In this case, however, it's audio associated with a video. Um....really?

Don't get me wrong, I'm just as cynical as the next HN'er and there's no doubt that Color still isn't worth a single percent of the millions of funding dollars it gobbled up, but...

Twitter defined themselves by trading features and verbosity for accessibility and rapid consumption. And they seem to be doing doing pretty well with that.

At the very least, it will be interesting to see how this pivot plays out for them.

I take your point, but the Twitter analogy would be a microblogging service that bans the use of articles in messages.

Maybe... or maybe a more appropriate Twitter analogy would be that links to articles weren't automatically linked.

I meant articles as parts of speech, like "the".

I wouldn't get stuck on the lack of audio part. It can't be too far behind.

You keep saying that in this thread, but I can't for the life of me imagine why you would launch a live-video product without audio. It just doesn't make any sense, is likely to be taken as the site "being broken", and finally result in a "um..that's dumb" when the fact that audio is intentionally excluded is revealed to the user.

To be blunt, for a video-broadcasting site, frickin' AUDIO isn't a "fringe" feature.

pork, it's not allowing me to reply to your comments so I'll just reply here.

I'm not disagreeing with you that audio is necessary and if it's part of the development plan, it should have been a major priority and I probably wouldn't have launched without it.

With that said, it's an assumption on our part that audio is necessary, even for for short 30-sec videos and they are putting that assumption to the test. Without audio, I don't think it'll work... but who knows. Until you test, you can't tell for sure.

You have to wait to post replies sometimes, depending how many levels down the conversation is. This is a safeguard against threads full of knee-jerk back-and-forth responses, I suppose.

It's not about it being far behind. Audio isn't a feature; it's something you have to intentionally take away. It seems like an odd choice.

But it's Social! And Facebooky! To not give them money would be like starving a puppy! You wouldn't starve a puppy would you?

Admittedly - it's a puppy that will chew up your credit cards and sell your beans recipe to all comers, but hey, isn't he cuuuute!

I generally have trouble judging the use or viability of services like this. My first reaction was to call it useless because I doubt that I will ever use something like this. But I've said the same thing about other services, most recently Instagram. Apparently I'm not in their market.

Now looking past whether or not I will ever use this (I won't) there isn't as far as I know much in the way of social video sharing. While there is of course Youtube, Color seems to place an emphasis on easy seamless sharing, something that people seem to want.

Some things I feel that would make the product far more compelling would be audio, and privacy. While I haven't logged in, it seems that videos shot through Color are available on the site for browsing Youtube style. I would much prefer directly sharing them to networks of my choice.

> there isn't as far as I know much in the way of social video sharing

SocialCam has been nailing this pretty good, IMHO.

http://socialcam.com

I think not having audio makes it easier to use on small mobile devices in a crowded room, like watching at a party or on a subway.

"Video without audio"

I think it possibly might have something to do with federal wiretap laws.

"Electronic eavesdropping is the use of an electronic transmitting or recording device to monitor conversations without the consent of the parties"

"Federal wiretap laws apply to oral, wire, and electronic communications. However, the federal law does not currently regulate silent video communications, such as webcams or other video monitoring without an audio component. "

https://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs9-wrtp.htm

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/03/school-lapto...

Heh. Want to place any bets they built the whole thing audio included and just before launch brought in the lawyers who quickly said WTF? To which the product team said ORLY?

Grandcentral (which was bought by google and is now google voice) had a great feature that when you received a phone call you could record it at any time. That feature was dropped by google. The laws vary by state. The state I used to be in you needed two party consent. The state I am in now only one party has to consent (so you can record your own phone calls in a one party state).

I believe that the same applies to surveillance cameras which is why most of them don't have audio they only have video.

Oh ok, here:

"Recording audio without the persons permission is almost always illegal, that's why our covert cameras don't have microphones. "

http://www.palmvid.com/content/support/legal-information-reg...

The title link takes you to the download page (which doesn't tell you anything about the app).

Head to http://color.com/#landing to see more about the app.

And if you want to come back and tell us what you think, be sure to hit “back” twice in rapid succession, because color.com spent their $41 million dollars hiring web developers who gratuitously break the web.

Hmm, worked fine for me in Chrome.

Safari on OS X and Mobile Safari on my iPad both redirect from color.com/#landing to color.com, then back to color.com/#landing. So hitting back once takes me to some kind of intermediate hell that redirects to /#landing.

But I’m glad it’s working for you. Maybe it’s my fault!

I don't have that problem either with FF or Chrome. If they fixed it between your post and mine, at least $41M gets you reactive web devs. :)

I did notice that on my Mac (10.7) and Chrome (15.0.874).

This seriously has to be one of the crappier pivots I can remember, especially from a startup with 41 million raised.

Seem like Color is trying so hard, it kind of turns me off from wanting to try it.

http://www.color.com/#howItWorks

Specifically:

* the background music with strumming guitar and bells seems really "yesterday" Apple-esque

* doorbell sound at the end reeks of trying to get consumer to associate that noise with the Color brand

You can try to brain wash me to fall in love with your product, but don't make it so obvious!

I'll cut through the piles of snark that I knew would inevitably show up on this thread and say I now understand why these guys got so much venture capital. This idea, and the previous one they had, while maybe not runaway successes, are damn clever. Yes, it's more social-such-and-such, but they are really taking some very unique approaches here, and with 40M in the bank it's clear they're going to keep iterating until they do find success.

There have been plenty of times where I've witnessed something that I wished I could've shared with a few friends. When I see something crazy happen, my first instinct is to tell someone about it. It's the equivalent of tapping a buddy on the shoulder and saying "woah, dude, over there. Look!"

If I get tapped on the shoulder by this color app you can bet I'll check it out. I've got 30 seconds.

At any rate, I find it disheartening to constantly see so many negative comments about everything color.com does. It smacks of so many sour grapes.

You can already do this -- better -- with whatsapp or probably a bunch of other platforms that are more useful.

But you've just had the exact opposite knee-jerk reaction to the one you were commenting on -- by assuming that we're all "sour grapes". Instead, you could consider that our criticism of Color is legitimate. I think a reason a lot of us are skeptical is that if you took Color's business plan and general idea and applied to YC/TechStars/any VC, you would probably get polite looks of boredom and stifled yawns. We've also been hearing of a somewhat cynical underlying purpose to an otherwise fluffy mobile app, i.e., that it was meant to be a "data mining platform", which doesn't exactly breed goodwill from people who are trying to create consumer-centered products.

So why again does Color deserve any slack from (what I feel is rightly deserved) criticism?

I should have clarified that I meant a lot of the criticism sounds like sour grapes, not all. The point I want to make is that if it wasn't public knowledge how much money these guys took, I think the reaction on HN to these ideas would be very different. My guess is that the 40M scandal makes it pretty much impossible for these guys to get a fair shake in the developer community.

Nitpick: you might call that envy or schadenfreude, but it's not sour grapes. Sour grapes would be if someone were talking down the desirability of $40 million itself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes

It looks similar to http://keek.com which I saw today on MoMB as "the easiest way to share microvideo with friends, family and the world."

Which itself looks like a video version of the YC backed site http://dailybooth.com (and messageparty)

add: http://www.mobypicture.com/ could be best because it does a/v/i with sharing and apps (inc new iphone app http://mathys.vanabbe.com/proudly-presenting-the-new-moby-ip...)

So... mobile justin.tv without audio with Facebook integration? Did I miss anything?

Seems like a thing I might use if it had audio, which they might be working on.

PS: I hope they still have at least $40.5 mil still in the bank.

They really should give the VC's their money back. You can't win them all.

This is like http://qik.com but without the audio.

The one thing I really liked about the last version was the logo which they killed in the latest version. Bill replied saying "Old logo was too complex to produce. Update that came out is a partial of our FB work. More will come w/ OG."

Ah, you have to login with Facebook just to view a preview of their not-quite-videos. What is the benefit to not including audio with the videos? (Besides that it surely uses less bandwidth.)

wtf? Why would I ever want to be interrupted with someone's (even my friend's) stupid skateboarding video?

I can't think of a single use for this product.

You could be at Startup Weekend and live broadcast your Office Hours session to the world... if they had audio, which can't be that far behind.

EDIT: Nevermind. They limit the broadcast to 30 seconds.

I don't think audio was omitted merely because this is an MVP and they didn't have the time or resources for it - it's pretty clearly part of the main concept of the product.

I can think of several reasons why this might be a good idea. For example, audio recording on mobiles can be really bad - maybe that makes regular video recording apps less popular. Audio makes the downloads heavier. Audio makes consuming the content require more focus from the user - it has to mute any music, phone conversation, etc. Audio makes 30s of video seem too short to say anything meaningful - omitting it makes 30s seem like a long time for a "moving photo". Etc.

I can't say if any of these things really make for a good product that people will want to use - it still seems fairly ridiculous to me - but I don't know why everyone's so dismissive of the idea that there's any benefit to omitting audio.

Yet the video that shows off the product on their web site has sound. Oh the irony...

Just a few years ago, "41 shots" was the rallying cry. Now it is "41 million."

Who?

So besides being nothing but a crappy Facebook plugin, it's also not available outside the U.S.A. Good thing you prevented those furriners from downloading your app, otherwise they might upload their soundless foreign videos...

Color.com, instead of not rendering at all on Firefox, now does render after about a 1.5 second delay. So there's some improvement. At this rate, in about 1000 years they'll have something worthwhile.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com