Color Me Skeptical

Color AppSo with all this talk about the latest hot new social app Color, I just HAD to try it out.  If you haven’t already heard about it or have, but still don’t GET how it works then don’t worry you’re not alone.  Color is described as an “elastic social network” that uses geo-location to connect people that are within 150ft of you.  In addition, it uses algorithms to determine your closest friends by how often you guys have used the Color app near each other.  So theoretically if this catches on, you’d be able to see tons of photos of your friends and random people that are near you or had at one point been in the same location that you are at.  So why the name “color”?  Well, the app forces you to keep hanging out with your friends and taking pictures with them in Color otherwise their photos will literally fade to black and disappear out of your elastic network.

With all this hype, I’m surprised that the average reviews for the app were only 2 stars. I must say I was expecting more.  Especially from a 41 million dollar funded project headlined by industry “superstars.”  Enough with the speculation, I just had to try it out and see if it lives up to the hype.

First impression: simple and straight forward – take a picture and submit.
Second impression: that’s it?
Third impression: um… where’s the “social” part… I’m alone here.

Yeah, I know it just launched, but I can’t help having the same feeling as I did when testing out Google Wave for the first time.  It too was described as “reinventing” social networking… and we all know what happened to that.  What surprises me most is that they don’t have any options to link to facebook, twitter, tumblr or even foursquare.  Wow, bold move. As simple as the design is, the UI is not very intuitive at all.  It took me a while to figure out where my profile pic was and how to connect to facebook and twitter.

With so many social apps out there, do we really need another standalone one?  Color me skeptical.

For now, you can catch me on Instagram: MichaelPhan.