Post(s) tagged with "color"

Bill Nguyen: The Boy In The Bubble | Fast Company ⇢

Profile of Color CEO Bill Nguyen, one that makes him sound more than enigmatic, perhaps clinically hypomanic.

21 October 2011 3 Permalink
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littlebigdetails: pinboard.in - When changing your password, the new password text box uses a low contrast font and forgoes the typical type-your-password-again pattern. /via Lenny Sirivong

littlebigdetails:

pinboard.in - When changing your password, the new password text box uses a low contrast font and forgoes the typical type-your-password-again pattern.

/via Lenny Sirivong

9 October 2011 50 littlebigdetails Permalink
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Facebook’s Purported Upcoming iPhone Photo Sharing App ⇢

John Gruber is not buying the Facebook iPhone photo app like all the other SF fanboys:

MG Siegler:

Either way, based on the images in front of us, the best way to think about it appears to be Path meets Instagram meets Color meets (Path’s new side project) With — with a few cool twists.

Sounds great, except for the Path, Color, and Facebook parts.

It’s the Google Wave of photos. (barf.)

17 June 2011 2 Permalink
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Troubled Startup Color Loses Cofounder Peter Pham ⇢

As Techcrunch reports, cofounder/president Peter Pham leaves Color, which could be a good thing if he is the source of the stumbles of the company. I have always thought Pham was a smart guy, but don’t know about his product skills. Photobucket was a much more conventional play.

He’s been gone only a month, not long enough to see the results of how Nguyen is running the place now that Peter’s gone.

I enjoyed my use of Color during the Podio launch party in San Francisco a few months back, but have not used it since, really. It’s UX is awkward or mysterious, depending on your viewpoint, and there are so many alternatives, like Instagram.

I look forward to other innovation in the space, and it may be that Color will be part of that.

15 June 2011 Permalink
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Beyond has published some research showing that geolocal social tools — check-in tool, specifically — haven’t reached a critical mass of use. It seems that sticking point is privacy concerns. My sense is that they haven’t got the social interaction right. People seldom want to communicate directly with strangers, but participatory observation — which is how the Color photosharing app works — is a different story. Participatory observation — like seeing someone in a public place — is a natural consequence of existing in the physical world. I can observe others, and they can observe me, and we are both in a situation where we can be aware of others seeing us. But participatory observation is limited by the physics of shared public spaces. And bounded by memory: the memories of those who observed me when I was there, in that park, restaurant, or airport. These issues are also linked to social density: certain kinds of interaction are only interesting when many people are in close proximity, like at a music festival, a bachelor party, or a conference. Just the suggestion that your location could be accessible to non-local people, and possible accessible without a complex and strong set of interpersonal constraints, leads to the conclusion that these tools are more trouble for most than they are worth. At times I want my pals to know where I am, and at other times I only want my lover to know. And at others, I want no one to know, but I would like a record for my own recollection. I think this will require a set of small, very focused apps, scaled to do one sort of geolocal interaction well, rather than one monster check-in app. Like the app Marco, which helps friends find each other on a map. Or an app that lets me leave virtual notes on businesses for others to read. Or an app to receive coupons from various commercial categories: restaurants, bars, clothing stores, food stores, etc. The win in this space might be to build a geolocal platform on which dozens of geolocal apps could be built.

Beyond has published some research showing that geolocal social tools — check-in tool, specifically — haven’t reached a critical mass of use. It seems that sticking point is privacy concerns.

My sense is that they haven’t got the social interaction right. People seldom want to communicate directly with strangers, but participatory observation — which is how the Color photosharing app works — is a different story. Participatory observation — like seeing someone in a public place — is a natural consequence of existing in the physical world. I can observe others, and they can observe me, and we are both in a situation where we can be aware of others seeing us. But participatory observation is limited by the physics of shared public spaces. And bounded by memory: the memories of those who observed me when I was there, in that park, restaurant, or airport.

These issues are also linked to social density: certain kinds of interaction are only interesting when many people are in close proximity, like at a music festival, a bachelor party, or a conference.

Just the suggestion that your location could be accessible to non-local people, and possible accessible without a complex and strong set of interpersonal constraints, leads to the conclusion that these tools are more trouble for most than they are worth. At times I want my pals to know where I am, and at other times I only want my lover to know. And at others, I want no one to know, but I would like a record for my own recollection.

I think this will require a set of small, very focused apps, scaled to do one sort of geolocal interaction well, rather than one monster check-in app. Like the app Marco, which helps friends find each other on a map. Or an app that lets me leave virtual notes on businesses for others to read. Or an app to receive coupons from various commercial categories: restaurants, bars, clothing stores, food stores, etc.

The win in this space might be to build a geolocal platform on which dozens of geolocal apps could be built.

Source: thenextweb.com

12 May 2011 5 Permalink
colorgeolocationmarcoparticipatory observationplatformssocial toolsxlsocial density

Just as Google had early dominance in lighting up a portion of the web, Facebook has early dominance in lighting up a portion of the world’s social graph. But much like the Dark Web, there exists network upon network not yet graphed by Facebook, waiting to be mapped, organized, and optimized for communication.

This is the unlit social graph, and this is where Facebook is vulnerable.

Let’s talk examples.

For years I have been looking for a solution to the pick-up basketball problem. I have a large-ish network of people that I play hoops with in San Francisco. This network has not yet been lit up by any online service. While most of these people are on Facebook, they are hard to organize as I don’t know many of their last names. And furthermore, even if I did know their last names, I would feel awkward friending them on Facebook, as they’re not really my friends.

It’s a network, but it’s not a friend network, not a professional network, and not a work network. This particular network is a place based network, aligned around various basketball courts in San Francisco.

Over the years, we’ve tried to light up our hoops network, but haven’t been able to find the right tools. We tried Google Groups, but it got overrun by spammers. A Facebook Group set up for this purpose never really got traction.

We tried GroupMe, but the push aspect wasn’t appropriate, it needed to be pull – find ballers when you’re ready to play, not when others are ready to play.

Just last week, I read about a company called Sportaneous that is trying to solve this problem.

Ubiquitous smartphones and always on access to umbrella social graphs are suddenly making these sort of tools possible.

And the opportunity is far larger than pick-up basketball, or even sports. Every school is a network, every employer is a network, every bar is a network, every office building is a network, every hobby is a network, every neighborhood is a network, and at an extreme level, every shared interest is a network, regardless of location.

This doesn’t even get at the disposable, or elastic networks as discussed by companies like Nearverse and Color – people that happen to just be nearby each other for a snapshot of time.

All of these networks share two common characteristics. 1) They are not yet graphed in a mainstream way by Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Jive, or any other dominant, online social service; and 2) They are all mappable with a smartphone.

- Lawrence Coburn, The Unlit Social Graph - TNW Location

I am not so sure that the unlit corners of our social networks are all mappable with a smartphone, in some exclusive sense. But I do agree that large parts of the multidimensional social network are unmapped.

PS Can we all agree to stop using the term ‘social graph’? It’s a Zuckebergism, and has no meaning other than what mathematicians, social anthropologists, and other scientists have been talking about for decades as social networks.

So then we would refer to this issue as dark networks.

Source: thenextweb.com

10 April 2011 9 Permalink
lawrence coburnunlit social networksfacebooklinkedintwittersportaneousgroupmeplace-based networksnearversecolordark webdark networks
A Colorful Weekend - MG Siegler ⇢

MG heads to a bachelor party in Mexico, and finds out that Color — the new proximity-based photo sharing app — works as advertised, and in a very different way from other apps.

Maybe the $41M pre-launch injection of capital has sucked all the oxygen out of the discussion about the app. A bunch of folks were using it at the recent Podio launch party in San Francisco, and we all thought it was cool as hell.

Color really shines in a setting of maximum social density and activity — like parties, concerts, or conferences. It may be equally interesting to use in a voyeuristic way in areas of high population — like wandering through Soho — if there are enough hipsters around to give you their perspective via photostream.

It won’t displace other photo sharing apps, like Instagram, but it will change the way we experience the most socially rich events.

10 April 2011 Permalink
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More Like A City Than An Army

In recent appearances, I have used a certain example to make a case about the openness in businesses of the future, contrasting today’s organizations with cities. ‘You don’t have to ask if you want to move to NYC’ I say. ‘You just show up, and start doing your thing, interacting with people, renting a storefront, buying things.’

‘Imagine a business where you can just show up and say, I want to work here. And you’d be engaged in the workings of the business by making connections with people.’

People are generally dumbfounded when I say this.

How could it work? First of all, the business would have to knowingly be open to these sorts of interactions. Other residents of the business-as-city would have joined in the same way, and there would be patterns of interaction and social contexts set up for that purpose.

So, it’s just a set of social constructs that surround and support the work to be done, like establishing a way to get paid for work done in a business-as-city.

So, it’s been a thought experiment, a Schrödinger’s Cat,  until I read that Color’s CEO is trying to run this experiment at the new photo-centric social tool startup.

Jason Kincaid, Color’s Totally Public Photo Swapping Service Has A Public Office To Match

Color CEO Bill Nguyen, who sold Lala to Apple in 2009 before starting Color, has written a letter to passersby inviting them to come inside and check out the office — where they’ll actually be able to submit ideas for the product.

Here’s the full text:

“What is Color? We are an open social network for your iPhone and Android.

This is our home that we’ll be opening to our community. You can come in during the day and participate in our product vision. We’ll take your ideas and build them into our efforts. Whether you are a high school student, Stanford Phd candidate, or just an interested Palo Alto neighbor we can’t wait to meet you.

Regards,
Bill, CEO, Color

We’ve confirmed that the letter was indeed written by Nguyen, and he isn’t just paying lipservice to the neighbors — Color has every intention of opening parts of its office to the public.

I will follow up with Nguyen, and see whether this is just a tactic, or is he envisioning a business-as-city.

Some background: Cities exhibit superlinear performance, unlike businesses which are sublinear. As new employees are added to a business, performance decreases per employee. Cities are the only human artifact that break this trendline: they increase in productivity as more people move in.

So, business should aspire to take on the characteristics of cities — to the degree feasible — to break past sublinear performance.

The first step might be to break down the barriers that thwart brilliant and hard working people who want to work with Apple or Color from doing so. All the heat loss associated with resumes, headhunting, and confirming SAT scores — the entire HR department — might be just a waste of effort. What if they just let people choose?

Of course, the company would have to be organized in a vastly different way. People could ‘work’ at such a future Apple by just showing up, but they might have to convince others to let them participate on projects, or get an idea funded, or change a product’s features. We’d have to have a wildly different notion of ‘management’: one that would be fully distributed in some way.

This theme is an aspect of what I call messiness-at-scale: for companies to go superlinear, they have to drop all plans to keep things tidy, and accept a state of near chaos, out at the far edge, where the power curve of innovation, creativity, and resilience is at its strongest.

At any rate, this is the first actual evidence I have seen that CEOs are starting to think about this. More to follow, I am sure.

Source: TechCrunch

29 March 2011 3 Permalink
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courtenaybird: iPhone app store of “Color” may be best app store review ever

courtenaybird:

iPhone app store of “Color” may be best app store review ever

28 March 2011 4 courtenaybird Permalink
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About

Web anthropologist, futurist, author. My focus is the future, and the tectonic forces pushing business, media, and society into an unclear and accelerating future. more.

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Socialogy

  • John Hagel | John offers up some great insights, like the fact that passion is lower the larger that businesses get.

  • Euan Semple | A chat with my old pal, and the author of Organizations Don't Tweet, People Do

  • Will McInnes | The author of Culture Shock and managing director of Nixon/McInnes

  • Jennifer Magnolfi | An interview with the woman who said, 'Work is not a place you go, it's a thing you do'.

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  • What Drives Us? | A draft chapter of my book, discussing motivations, Maslow's hierarchy, and fluidarity.

  • Socialogy: Interview With John Hagel | I Speak with Joh Hagel about the innovation at the edge.

  • Complex organisation arises from webs of interaction among causal factors | So, it turns out that DNA is, in fact, a great metaphor for business culture, but only after you realize that DNA is not a few hundred off-on switches, but instead a universe of unknowable complexities, that we can interact with, and understand at some abstract cartoonish level, but not control, and never fully comprehend.

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  • Innovators Get Better With Age | Companies make a mistake by relying too much on the innoations of the young, because Nobel laureats don't come into their prime until their 50s.

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  • Infodemics | 2009 | Passing incomplete or inaccurate information about some risk event can make people take actions that increase the damage of the event itself.

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