I'm fascinated by this Photo-Sharing-is-tip-of-the-iceberg tidbit:

"A few feats of engineering brilliance hide under Color's slick surface. How does the app determine who's in the same room with you? Not with GPS, which is flummoxed by floors because it can't distinguish vertical distances between people. So Nguyen's team taught Color to use a phone's lighting and audio sensors, stitching their signals together with the sound and light environments of nearby devices to determine which user is where--it's almost like a bat's senses."

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0411/technology-photo-app-...

But what happens if you have 500 people in different rooms in the same building? "Detecting when people are taking pictures at roughly the same time in the same room" sounds like an awesome piece of technology with about zero practical uses in terms of iPhone apps. Sure, if you have a bunch of uncoordinated autonomous fly-robot things, it would be great to give them really cheap sensors and stitch everything together Dark Knight style, but who needs this in an iPhone app?

Yeah, I too noticed the mic and camera monitoring being an integral part of the app. It seems to me they realize privacy issues stemming from this and are trying to downplay them by calling the microphone an "audio sensor". And this just does not sit right with me. Feeding users half-truths for their own sake is a slippery path.

But perhaps I am overreacting.

I don't buy it either. You're telling me that every room on the same floor of a building (for example) has a specific audio signature, but identical rooms on other floors do not? I betcha if I sat next to the pop machine in my office's cafeteria, it wouldn't match the ambient noise in the conference room next door.

I would imagine it does the analysis locally and sends some sort of "room signature" to the server, rather than a complete audio stream, which would be an awful waste of bandwidth.

So... it's the great photo sharing app of all time, then? Um, ok? $41MM?

When's the last time you had even the faintest urge to share a photo? I'm a geek, and that urge hits maybe once every other week.

I think his point is that the photo sharing is little more than a proof of concept. The exciting thing is the automation of ad-hoc networking. The internet collapses geography, but as a result it does a poor job of many tasks at the local level - search for 'Bob's diner' and you may find that you're just on the wrong side of the block, or you might get info on cheap flights to some completely other city containing a more famous restaurant with the same name.

The technology underlying Color seems like a much-needed metric for establishing spatial (and by implication, temporal) relevance. An accurate and behavior-based metric of relevance, as opposed to one based on self-selection via search/signup, would be very, very easy to monetize. Say you're in the fashion business. You could buy online ads to reach people who search for fashion-related stuff online, but wouldn't you rather reach people who spend a lot of time in the same places as your target demographic?

You're selling the technology to me. It sounds interesting. But so was that iPhone app that translated Spanish out of OCR'd video in real time, rendering the results back in the correct perspective. Shouldn't the real-life Babelfish be worth more --- and I mean, to the market --- than Color?

I had the same thought (roughly)..

Their concept of an "elastic" network that naturally decays your connections with people you associate with less is a perfect complement to a network that self-organizes in the first place.

It's like Foursquare/Facebook where you have to opt out of publicizing your entire life. I suppose advertisers (the FBI?) are drooling over the possibilities, and that's probably what fuels the investment more than user excitement.

Also, "everyone who was at the bar last night automatically sees the pictures (without any pesky 'publish' button or other form of 'opting in')" may be a more compelling user story than you give it credit for.

I'm looking forward to all the "Fired/Divorced for Facebook/Twitter comments" equivalents that result from photos taken by other people you were in the same bar as turning up in your friends, family, spouses and bosses photostreams.

I think photo sharing is just a shot at hooking into a really valuable data stream. All they should want are phones that are turned on and sending them pictures, audio, and location info, and they can turn around and spit out all kinds of analytics that advertisers will eagerly pay for.

I think you vastly underestimate the driving compulsion of millions of attention whores to get random men to tell them how hot they are by virtue of myspace angles and flattering lighting.

So let's call Color the Rebecca Black of Web 2.0.

Too immature, too early to tell, too much attention out of nowhere, too much momentum for too little effort. But it looks good, right?

Rebecca Black is already profitable...

Nice one.

If you invited me over for diner and then pulled out a photo album, I would leave. The concept is cool, but photo sharing is over hyped.

Is photo sharing this generation's equivalent of the mandatory family Kodachrome slide show?

It's not a wheel. It's a carousel.

Quote from the scene http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2bLNkCqpuY

An example of perfect marketing.

That's what also struck me. I already have thousands of photos that I don't look at - both hardcopy and on a hard drive.

Could this be an "old boys' network" type of deal? Investing in it because one of their other established investments is in line to purchase it? Is something like that allowed? If it is, presumably it happens regularly.

I'm reminded of the nerd response to iPad.

I don't have a dog in the hunt, but the idea behind Color is interesting. It could crash and burn but I'll reserve judgment until I see normal people (non-nerds) engaging with it.

Meanwhile, the vehemence is weird from everyone, especially Gruber. I wonder if he would have posted the same entry if Color had a Lonely Sandwich video.

The iPad is a computer that, as far as my mom is concerned, you never have to boot, don't have to think about the operating system on, don't require peripherals for, can stick in your purse, can tap 3-4 times to get install any of 10's of thousands of applications, can tap 3-4 times to install any of thousands of movies and TV shows on, and costs half of what a cheap laptop cost only recently.

Can you inform me of the obvious potential of "Color" that I'm missing? Because I also seriously don't get it. And: I like Instagram. But I don't think it's the future or anything.

(Yes. They would have dodged this Daring Fireball post if Adam Lisagor had done a video for them.)

It took me over a year before I "got" twitter. Now it would be hard to see how I could replace it - tracking outages, ongoing event updates, what my friends are up to, revolutions in Egypt - Heck, our company's public feed is actually the best way for me to track what's happening at our company than our internal mailing lists.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether there's any money in it. Everyone I know uses AIM - but I don't know if AOL has ever been able to monetize that.

Regarding Color - I'll give it a bit of time, and see what I think after I go to an event with groups of friends, and see what happens when we (and others) are taking pictures.

This is a fair point, and one I hadn't considered. Bravo!

But, getting Twitter doesn't mean Twitter pre-any-users-at-all was worth investing $41m at a possible $80m valuation. It might still not be, as it has no business plan to speak of.

I guess I'm naive, but I usually apply the "can (Facebook|Google|Big Company of the Decade) copy this quickly?" as a measure for the value of a service, but then again, it doesn't seem to apply for Place checkins (neither Facebook nor Google seem to have made too much traction against FourSquare) nor GroupOn. I guess that's why I'm not an investor :)

I think is spot on.

My children inherit my old iphones (no sims) and I'm going to set them up - will be interesting to see the photostreams from round my house and the places we go... (and if you are wondering I'm from the Bill Joy school of privacy - there isn't any and I learn to live with it)

I can see it being quite cool for meeting people too - if you are in a space and someone else is making pictures there.

I can also see the potential for hidden artworks/performance

I hope it does take off - it's a new kind of thing and really does have the power to transform our physical spaces

"Sounds like the nerd response to Twitter" is a pretty compelling restatement of the parent's point. Thanks.

> The iPad is a computer that, as far as my mom is concerned...

Preaching to the choir, man. iPad is amazing, especially for mom.

But the point stands: nerds, especially as a group, have no idea what people want.

And his opinion is important why?