Opinion

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  March 24, 2011 Opinion

  Proposed Update Will Make Color Even Less Useful

  Last night, Color, the photo-sharing app with $41 million backing from major Valley VC firms, launched to much hype and an even greater backlash. There is no point in rehashing the discussion about it, but my personal opinion is pretty clear: the app’s concept may do well at conferences and other events (and hence I’m surprised it wasn’t launched at SXSW), but the current user experience is bad and the concept just doesn’t sound appealing to a mainstream audience. Now, however, Color’s CEO Bill Nguyen has told Mashable that “his team has heard the criticism loud and clear, and is moving fast to make changes to the app to fix its biggest problem: that people feel lonely when they use the app all by themselves.”

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  March 24, 2011 Opinion

  Did Color Botch Its Launch by Launching at the Wrong Time & in the Wrong Place?

  Color, the new photo sharing app from the brains behind the online music service Lala, launched last night. There are some ingenious algorithms behind the app, and while I wrote a rather scathing review of the app last night, I think the app’s reception could have been very different if it had launched at a different time and in a different place.

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  March 21, 2011 Opinion

  The New York Times Idiotwall

  It took the New York Times almost two years and close to $40 million dollars to come up with its paywall scheme and the results neither reflect this huge investment in manpower nor money. It’s a mess that was designed by committee. I actually believe that most people would be more than willing to pay a reasonable amount for access to the NYTimes’ generally excellent reporting. The problem is, it almost feels as if the paywall was designed to scare away just those readers who would be willing to pay.

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  March 21, 2011 Opinion

  What Twitter's 5th Anniversary Video Tells Us About Its Future

  Twitter celebrates its 5th anniversary today. While the company has recently taken to annoying its users with the #dickbar and is working hard on alienating its developers, Twitter decided to mark its birthday with a celebrity-studded video featuring Piers Morgan, Snoop Dogg, Hilary Clinton and Serena Williams, among many others. In it, Snoop Dogg tells us why he follows Martha Stewart, Piers Morgan explains that his show prep largely consists of checking out what his guests are saying on Twitter (which explains a lot, I think) and a musician named Julian Perretta says that he uses Twitter as a way of “learning what [he] should do” (which also explains a lot).

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