Color.com and the new pace of development
Jinfo Blog

By Nancy Davis Kho

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Yesterday saw the release of the new Color app on the Android and Apple app stores. It's a new breed of social network - termed "implied social network" or ISN, in a detailed review on the launch.is blog written by Jason Calacanis and team. The idea is that users can utilise Color to share photos and videos with other people who have iPhones (or Androids) within 150 ft to create a group album. On its surface, it sounds like a fun application for a birthday party, a wedding, or a night on the town. Investors thought so - Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank were among the backers providing $41m in start-up funding.

With time and some fiddling, I could see Color.com being useful for corporate teams attending trade shows or doing competitive intelligence gathering, and for journalists researching a story on site. Similarly, if the sharing aspect were to move beyond video into multimedia file sharing, the notion of creating "social networks on the run" of related information could be a unique answer to challenges of mobility, workflow integration, and user engagement in the business information sharing space.

But what the launch of Color really got me thinking about is development cycles, and how consumer applications have really set new expectations for the pace of development.  The product launched yesterday, with a modicum of instruction: in fact about the only user instruction one sees is the tongue-in-cheek tagline "Warning: Do Not Use Color Alone". Yet it flew up to the 27th most popular app in the US Apple App store, and 54th in the UK (as www.colour.com, of course), by the end of its first day.

According to this post on paidContent.org, that's when the blowback started. Users complained about the super spare user interface, the nonsensical buttons at the bottom of the screen, and the lack of tutorials. But here's the thing: by the end of Day 2, version  1.0.1 had been launched, providing "assorted fixes and sharing improvements".  Its founder, Bill Nguyen, tweeted #wecandobetter and promised further upgrades, pronto, and pushed updates for the Android app this afternoon.

It remains to be seen whether this app will be the Next Big Thing or the Next Big Chatroulette. But as consumers grow steadily accustomed to software fixes and improvements that come within hours, not months, of product launch, how long will it be before they turn to the providers of their business software solutions (that may run on the same mobile device where they're running Colour.com) and say "What's taking you guys so long?".

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