A new photosharing app launched for iOS and Android today called Color, claiming that it "reinvents community."
How so? Instead of sharing your photos with people you've chosen to connect with, the app pushes your photos to anyone within a couple hundred feet of where you're standing.
Privacy concerns aside (because really, what private person is using public photosharing apps?), the problem is to "reinvent community" with a location-based app, you'd need a dense community there in the first place. And most Americans don't live (or work) in the kinds of dense, photogenic places where this kind of app would make sense.
In my Twitter stream, David Gallagher, deputy tech editor at the New York Times, summed up the Color user-experience best, "So far on Color, neighbor Chris has shot his beige carpet."
Welcome to American office design! Up next, artsy photos of bathroom paper towel dispensers. After that, shots and shots of Arby's chicken fingers and cocktails at Applebee's.
I'm not saying that Color won't work in some places. The user interface is slick, if not as intuitive as you might hope. Color might work great if the United States was filled with dense, walkable neighborhoods where people live and work, but those places are few and far between. If you want to see where Color might work, I'd start with this list of the country's most walkable cities.