Six months ago, social networking app Color™ (no longer available) hit the iTunes App Store. It focused on photo sharing and Facebook friends, but despite an interesting concept and a whole lot of financial backing, the startup failed to set the App Store on fire.
That might change with a big update that has been six months in the making.
Today, Color for Facebook has bet the farm on its Facebook integration, rethinking its original photo-based concept and throwing in a lot more abilities to create different content to augment your Facebook sharing experience. The app is geared toward sharing whatever you’re experiencing with your Facebook friends using video and photos. “Your status update needs an update,” the App Store listing states, and Color is an interesting way to rethink something that has become ubiquitous in online social networking.
Color for Facebook focuses on video “visits,” a quick and easy way of sharing what you’re doing at any given moment with your friends. The app lets you create a visit with one button push, and then it’s just a matter of using the camera on your iOS device to create a live, audio-free and unedited broadcast. You get 30 seconds of video recording, which goes directly onto your Facebook feed as a status update. Users can then view your short videos to get a glimpse of what you’re actually doing, and if someone sees an interesting image you’ve posted on your feed, they can even request a visit from you, allowing for live interaction through Facebook.
On the app side, Color reorganizes your Facebook feed to be a stylish, elegant feed of photos, cropped into thin strips. It makes viewing your friends’ visits pretty easy, but even if you don’t have friends using Color, the presentation of Facebook through the app is pretty slick. It’s a great way to see photos, both on your live feed and on a timeline that organizes what you’ve done and posted by day and time. Color creates a big scrolling feed of photos to look at, and if Facebook wasn’t addictive enough already, Color makes it even easier to get lost in the online updates of your friends.
If you skipped Color the first time around, it’s worth checking out on the second pass. The video status update and live broadcasting component is a nice way of interacting with Facebook and has a lot of potential. Color makes it easy to shoot and post video that it’s possible the feature will really take off as it’s as simple as pushing a single button and holding your phone in the air.
But where Color really shines is as a replacement for the standard Facebook view. Its photo-heavy presentation of Facebook really looks great on iOS devices and makes looking through shots a whole lot more interesting than the standard Facebook presentation. Those six months of work, it seems, have paid off pretty well.
