Color (right) is a new app that lets users post photos tagged with a location. It lets you browse the latest pics of people around your location, and form ad-hoc groups to bundle together shots from a group of friends in the same place.
Stuart Dredge in The Guardian says it brings to mind another photo-sharing app that launched last year: Path. There, the focus was on sharing pictures with just 50 close friends and family members. It provoked similar excitement among the big US tech blogs.
Dredge thinks these kinds of apps are in a Silicon Valley cultural bubble, where it may be a little too easy to assume that all your friends and family will be quick to catch on. Path – Nervous at Home from Path on Vimeo.
The answer may simply be to wire in Facebook, as Path does already … to your real friends. An app like Instagram has its own social network, but I suspect much more social activity around its filtered photos is happening on Facebook and Twitter.
Put it another way: if I made a list of my 50 closest friends and family members, none of them are using Path already. They won’t know about Color. And judging by my experience trying to tempt them onto Foursquare in recent months, they won’t be interested for a long time either.
