Monday, April 04, 2011

The Color Social Graph Might Work Better For Books, Movies, Music


Especially music. I don't think picture taking is overdone at all. Once Fred Wilson dismissed Facebook as "a photo sharing site." It was said at a major conference, and the comment sent a lot of pigeons flying, but he did point out a basic truth, which is that photo sharing is the primary activity on Facebook.

Google Images, Facebook Photos, Twitpic, Instagram, FoodSpotting

Vision is the dominant of our senses. And hence photography. From the outset I have not been too interested in people I already know. I mean I have been. But for me it has been about the promise of getting to know people I don't already know. My first Facebook account got suspended because I was sending friend requests left and right. I was emailing people who were members of groups I was interested in. One day my entire social graph was gone and I had to build one from scratch. Did not take long to bounce back.

I am not going to join the will Color sink or swim debate. I don't know if it will be a big hit, just like I don't know it won't. But I have a feeling it will stick around. It is an addition to the services already in play. It is just that it got launched with a big bang - 41 million dollars is a lot of money - and suddenly everyone was talking about it.

I have been more interested in Color's social graph. This is more about the social graph than about photography.
Forbes: Color, A Twitter For Photo And Video, Launches With $41 Million: Color, a new photo-centric social network ..... was created last summer by a group of seven Silicon Valley veterans led by Bill Nguyen (rhymes with win), who sold his last company Lala.com to Apple for an estimated $80 million. Nguyen hired a dozen or so engineers from Google, Facebook and LinkedIn, came up with a business plan around virtual currency, discarded that, came up with a wild new idea, bought the color.com domain name for $350,000 and raised $9 million from Bain Capital and $25 million Sequoia Capital, two very elite VC firms–all in a span of 7 months (plus $7 million in loans from Silicon Valley Bank), before ever launching a single product. ........ simple yet technically complex. Every photo or video you take in Color is stored in the cloud and can be seen almost instantly by anyone nearby ..... There’s no friend requests to manage or log-ins to deal with or synching with a PC. It’s studiously post-PC. ...... Every photo is immediately considered public and made public, as with Twitter. ..... forces you to choose between creation and consumption all the time. ..... All the photos and video taken in Color live in the cloud, so there are no memory limits to shooting or viewing ...... Video and photos are organized by date. You can tap a photo from weeks ago and go back to that day and time to see who was there or whatever comments arose. The number of photos you’re shown for each date contracts or expands based on the network volume that day. ...... you can go back in time on other people’s photo streams, assuming you’ve forged a bond with them by either being together a lot (Color knows who is nearby) or liking/commenting their photos and videos. You see more of each others’ photos and video if the bond stays tight, and if you grow apart or see them less often their media dissolves from your calendar-organized stream. Color calls these “elastic networks.” Thumbnails of people actually get darker or lighter as people grow closer or more distant in your network. ...... are pitching Color as a mobile app that will, ironically, get people off their phones and back into the real world. ...... Color networks you with distant friends but also with the daily activity of neighbors, coworkers and the barista at the Starbucks you go to everyday. ....... Color also compresses the time experience of social media. The act of sharing on Facebook, blogs, Tumblr or Twitter is still a discrete act. Step 1: Stuff happens to you. Step 2: You post about it and it becomes “what you think” about that which happened. Step 3: You check back to see the reaction. These steps could be separated by days or hours. Color connects in real-time and replaces objectivity with a tapestry. It’s Rashomon in real-time. ..... Color uses many of the 20 sensors on an iPhone to distinguish your location, even within a restaurant, and how long you’ve been sitting there. So if you’re sitting at a table for a while, suddenly the pastry chef’s photos of today’s goodies start flowing through your stream, like a digital dessert cart. ...... Nguyen showed Color to Sequoia megapartner Mike Moritz early last week. Within 24 hours Sequoia had committed $25 million and put partner Doug Leone on the board, joining Mike Krupka from Bain. Moritz, says Nguyen, “got the ‘wow’ moment of doing something together, not a day after like on Facebook. Even chat is like making a phone call because you have to get to it, but this connects people instantly.” ....... Color is meant to be ambient, assuming you have it open on your phone. This may be its best attribute. ..... a network that provides “ambient continuous contact” with other people we get in real world. Color takes us a step closer to that.
My "Neighbors" On Last.FM

Fred Wilson: The Implicit Social Graph: Color and what it means for mobile/social/local/realtime, augmented reality, and more. ..... There are most certainly some big ideas in the Color app. I've never put a mobile photo app on my phone but I put Color on it last night. I don't have any of my family on Color yet, but I hope to get them all on it today ...... I am in the "many social graphs" camp ..... I believe we will have at least dozens of social graphs in our lives. But even more, I believe that we will have social graphs that come and go and that are formed implicitly not explicitly. ....... My first experience with this sort of implicit social graph came almost six years ago via my musical neighbors graph at last.fm. ..... my musical neighbors graph looked differently last year and will look differently next year. ...... Last.fm uses my listening history to create an implicit social graph in real time. Color uses my location to do the same for photo sharing. There are a bunch of social news discovery services out there that use my current reading history to determine a "news/interest graph" implicitly in real time...... This is the next frontier in social networking ...... sometimes you only want a social graph for a weekend, a day, an hour, or a minute. The only way to make that work is to construct it implicitly. ...... I do care that they are pushing the envelope in social graph construction in an important direction. That's why Color is on my phone this morning and why I'm going to get my wife and my kids and their friends on it today and see what happens.

John Battelle: Why Color Matters: Augmented Reality And Nuanced Social Graphs May Finally May Come of Age: it may well be the first truly execution of augmented reality that truly scales...... I think it bridges an important gap in how we use the web today. And please know that my definition of "the web" is in no way limited to "PC based HTML". When I say web, I mean the digital platform through which we leverage our lives...... Colors combines the public social graph and instant sharing of Twitter with the "capture the moment" feel of an Instagram or Path. But the real twist is in the service's approach to location. To my mind, Colors has the opportunity to be the first breakout application fueled by the concept of "augmented reality." ..... my oft-repeated 2010 maxim: Location is the most important signal to erupt from the Internet since search. ...... a visual public timeline of any given location, in real time. Every single image captured at any given location is instantly "placed" at that location, forever, and is served up as an artifact of that location to anyone using the Colors application. ...... this is one of those ideas that is both A/ Ridiculously huge and B/ Ridiculously obvious in retrospect. ...... if Color is used by a statistically significant percentage of folks, nearly every location that matters on earth will soon be draped in an ever-growing tapestry of visual cloth, one that no doubt will also garner commentary, narrative structure, social graph meaning, and plasticity of interpretation. Imagine if Color - and the fundaments which allow its existence - had existed for the past 100 years. Imagine what Color might have revealed during the Kennedy assassination, or the recent uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, or hell, the Rodney King beating? ...... What Color really augurs is the ability to understand our shared sense of place over time - and that alone is mind-bendingly powerful. ....... the Color concept focused on music and festivals. ...... plasticity. By that I mean the ability to bend the concept of "social graph" beyond the inflexible "one ring to rule them all" model of Facebook to a more nuanced set of people you might care about in the context of place or moment. I love these kinds of steps forward, because it's just so damn clear we need them. ...... Oh, and note to Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare: If you don't get this feature into your service, pronto, you will more likely than not be rueing the day Colors launched
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