Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

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As troubled as Color is, it represents the future direction of location data. No longer will location data be just for its own sake- apps that answer "Where am I?" "Where are you?" "Where's lunch?" It's evolving to be something bigger. The future is integrating it into new uses, to answer questions we haven't even asked yet. For some examples, see:

News.me and Instapaper - Sync your articles to your phone as you leave your house, so that when you're underground on the train, you have all your content right there

Now - Combs instagram for clustered activity in your area, and then notifies you of what's going on (i.e. movie in the park that people are enjoying)

Dark Sky - Alerts you when it is going to rain in your precise location, based on radar

Square - Automatically logs you in as soon as you arrive at the coffee shop or wherever

What it boils down to is location is automating various parts of user interface. Making your life better in the process. (this post a tldr version of http://adage.com/article/special-report-digital-conference-s...)

> The future is integrating it into new uses, to answer questions we haven't even asked yet.

Actually, I think that's the exact wrong lesson to take from this. That's what Color did: look for something that hasn't been done before and did that. It was a solution to a problem that doesn't exist: meeting strangers. People don't want to meet strangers, unless they're looking to hook up. That's why we construct amazing home entertainment systems; so we can avoid being around strangers. Ditto for Highlight and Airtime.

The takeaway from Color is not to go searching for the next big thing, but rather solve a problem that you yourself have (warning, you are probably not a normal person so don't spend too much time solving the problem before releasing something).

> Actually, I think that's the exact wrong lesson to take from this. That's what Color did: look for something that hasn't been done before and did that. It was a solution to a problem that doesn't exist: meeting strangers

Color has never been about meeting strangers. Never.

v1 of the application allowed people who happen to be at the same place at the same time to share photos (still a great idea in my opinion, imagine concerts or random birthday parties where you hardly know anyone but everybody is taking pictures).

v2 was about live broadcasting (interesting tech but uninteresting product).

Your description of v1 sounds exactly like meeting strangers; am I missing something?

Yeah, v2 was about a different non-problem (normal people broadcasting their everyday lives).

v1 To me sounds more like a way to facilitate sharing. I suppose this could lead to fostering relationships between strangers but for example I would get immense benefit from just having additional/better photos for an event that another person decided to share.

> Your description of v1 sounds exactly like meeting strangers; am I missing something?

No, you never meet strangers. You get their photos, they get yours. You know nothing about them, except they are not too far from you.

And yet here we are, talking to strangers. All we needed was a good excuse and some notion of community expectations.

That's why meetups work; they are planned in advance, built around a common interest, with sane expectations and boundaries.

Everyone agrees it's the future, but how will the Geosocial mobile proximity app/network nut be cracked-- to launch and achieve mass appeal/usage? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4665294

>> "News.me and Instapaper - Sync your articles to your phone as you leave your house, so that when you're underground on the train, you have all your content right there"

That's not really a feature, it's more of a hack. The only reason Instapaper does this (not sure about News.me but I assume it's the same) is to get around background downloading restrictions on iOS. It's the only was to activate the app and download articles in the background. I'm sure they would much prefer to just check the server every 5 minutes and download new articles without the user having to set their location.

> (News.me and Instapaper - Sync your articles to your phone as you leave your house, so that when you're underground on the train, you have all your content right there

How is that location data? The sync operation is the same whether you're at home or at work.

It knows you're leaving a location, that's how.

...no it doesn't. Instapaper, AFAIK, syncs as soon as you open the app. It can't wait sync based on your relative movement from home (or the office) because it doesn't know when you will actually leave wifi/network range.

> Instapaper, AFAIK, syncs as soon as you open the app.

That's true, but there's also a feature in Instapaper (et al.) that will allow you to set up a geofence, and when you leave the geofence, it will launch itself in the background and sync.

It's useful for users who like to read Instapaper on a subway where there's no cell reception- you can set it to sync when you leave your office or house, and it will have downloaded everything by the time you get underground. It's just an automatic convenience so you don't have to remember to sync it manually.

Even though I don't ride a subway I find it useful, sometimes I'll get to a restaurant for lunch and there will be poor cell reception, but I can still read stuff I've just added to Instapaper.

It's also kind of a hack to allow periodic background syncing, because iOS doesn't allow apps to launch periodically to update themselves, but it DOES allow apps to launch when a geofence boundary is crossed.

Here's a blog post about it:

http://blog.instapaper.com/post/24293729146

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