Color: You Are Your Device

Disclaimer: This is mostly a rant.

If you’ve been living in a cave for the past months, you may not have seen “Colour”:http://www.color.com/. These guys “raised $41m in investment”:http://www.businessinsider.com/color-deal-2011-3 which in and of itself is seriously impressive. After that hit the headlines, I decided that just like everyone else i’d grab me a chilled bottle of tech koolade and try it out.

Now, I want to say here that my first impression of Colour was, well, underwhelming. When you’re alone, its useless. However, when you’re at an event, or gig, or somewhere else with a number of other people it was actually pretty awesome. Being able to collect a whole set of photos and events from a range of vantage points was quite awesome… It’s like event snaps, but on steroids because you automatically have everyone else’s.

There is however a rather huge “but” that has just reared its ugly head today. Colour identifies devices not people. This small but subtle difference is somewhat of a killer for Colour. Case in point: At the weekend I dropped my iPhone 4 by accident and totally destroyed the screen… this meant I had to get a replacement, which I did this morning. Upon reloading Colour from my backup, I no longer have all the pictures and groups from my old device because it thinks i’m someone “new”.

Guys, really, $41m and you cant make a login? I actually really liked the app, but having it not come with you when you change device is just such a killer. People these days have a really high turn over of mobile devices, so it simply doesn’t make sense to bind to the device… the service is meant to be about people and the photos they take, so perhaps it would be a super great idea to stop using the device ID as a route to identify people.

It generally feels like this could have been a really cool app, but its just lacking in some key areas.

End rant.