Color me this! Babbling about the photo-sharing bubble

I played with Color last night, feeling my way around yet another photosharing app, one with tons of VC money thrown at it and a celebrity founder. My take-away: It is a fundamentally new kind of photo app, for two reasons.

First, it turns taking and looking at pictures into a completely ephemeral game. Snap, look what just popped into your stream, taken by a complete stranger. Snap, laugh, like, snap, scan the restaurant for somebody’s face, check out the unknown neighbor’s couch. Drive down the street, and you suddenly see new pictures appear as if the camera was running an AR software that picks up aliens. In short, the serendipity and ease of use make it a fun experience. No sign-up, just open and shoot. The more you run into someone, the stronger the link grows, even if you don’t cross paths constantly.

Second, Color destroys the notion of keeping and sorting pictures as we know it. They all disappear into a maelstrom of activity in thumbnail sizes, no desktop version to speak of. The company behind the app, though, gets to harvest, mine and probably sell the metadata, the “elastic social graph”. The user, it seems, cannot save, extract or move all his images into a lasting kind of archive. You can’t even create traditional albums, the visual output all runs along a hyperlocal space/time zipline faster than your poor brain can process it, let alone remember it.

Color is perfect for the ADHD generation. And perfect, of course, to flush the last tiny scraps of privacy and opt-in considerations out of what used to be highly personal and intimate moments.

This app, in the end, is not about narrow-casting or broadcasting your photos and exploits, that’s been done by way too many companies already — from Instagram and Path to Live Share by Cool Iris. They are taking very traditional approaches for personal vanity and commercial marketing.

Color, on the other hand, is about the two-click gamification of your surroundings, second by second, step by step. Considering that they do this surreptitious mapping of the world along several axes without GPS makes this app even more of a curiosity.

There will be games and other services built on it soon, I’m sure. How long I’ll stick around to use it (for random discoveries and grins) while letting it use my life (for datamining and profit), that’s a different story.