Some thoughts on Color with a capital C

First, I wanted to set this up with a couple of assertions, that location is a signal, as John Battelle defined it, and that this signal will be extremely useful when wrapped around social objects, in the way that Jyri Engestrom intended the term way back in 2005, and it’s every bit as true today.

This is a slightly more structured way of just saying that location becomes meaningful in context.

I think we can all agree that Color flopped its launch. It chose proximity-oriented photos as the social object upon which to base the serendipitous creation of affinity groups. The hope was that this activity would be so engaging that people would be motivated to invite more people to use the app, they’d use it very frequently in many locations and Color would thus have access to a hyperlocalized two-way channel into the lives of their users.

The idea is that they would then use this so-called anonymous data to create user profiles and a rich database from which to launch advertising, local promotions and news-oriented feeds. I say so-called because they neglected to understand just how identifiable photographs of faces are! (Yes, I’m looking at you Facebook.)

Another surprising oversight given the data-driven nature of the founders is that “for the average person, knowing their approximate home and work locations — to a block level — identifies them uniquely.”

Isn’t it amazing how fast anonymity breaks down?

As if this wasn’t enough, Color’s original user interface was unintuitive in the extreme and absolutely required that you use the the application with at least one other person. So, it flopped big time.

Now that Color has quietly withdrawn from the scene, it’s back to the drawing board to roll out a different application that will feed their hungry proximity algorithms champing at the hyperlocal bit, not to mention their investors looking for gorgeous pivot. How will they deal with privacy and can they find the secret sauce to make me want to share my location with nearby strangers?

My prediction is that they will not. Their approach is all wrong; it’s backwards. You cannot define yourself “much more of a research company and a data mining company than a photo sharing site,” as Bill Nguyen did and expect to have the wild imagination and fire in your belly to create an amazingly compelling social application that lots of people will love. He has some interesting ideas about the social stickiness of proximity, but it’s all wrapped around how much data he’s going to collect and sell to advertisers.

My next post will explore another proximity application…

Update: Well this seems to support my guess… “Confirmed: Co-founder Peter Pham Leaves Color” and “Troubled Startup Color Loses Cofounder Peter Pham“. Trojan horses are not lovable.