Thursday marked the announcement of a raft of media apps for Facebook – from Spotify and Hulu to the Washington Post.
But its social rivals LinkedIn and Twitter ought to go one radical step further and consider moving wholesale to the Facebook platform, according to Bill Nguyen, co-founder of the Color photo sharing service, which has now done just that.
Color caused much excitement in Silicon Valley when it launched its innovative app in March on Apple and Android devices.
It made social networking automatic if you took a photo – anyone else using Color in your close proximity could see it straightaway and you could see their photos. Connections could be made and events such as weddings and rock concerts captured in the round.
But, although the VC firm Sequoia Capital gave it $41m and described Color as one of those companies that came along once or twice in a decade and changed everything, things went downhill rapidly after the launch.
Color had no mechanism or viral marketing in place to encourage people to install the app and those that did found they had hardly anyone to share photos with in their vicinity.
“Within minutes of launching, we realised we should have launched on Facebook,” Mr Nguyen told me this week, admitting to a considerable oversight.
The serial entrepreneur, who co-founded the La La music service bought by Apple in 2009, also saw Color suffer the negative publicity of high-profile departures, including co-founder Peter Pham.
Mr Nguyen explains this as being down to the decision to use Facebook’s platform. This meant there was no longer any need for Mr Pham’s post of business development.
The Palo Alto startup has been working with Facebook for the last six months on its integration and this has made Mr Nguyen a true believer in the power of the 800m-strong platform.
“If you’re Twitter or LinkedIn, you’ve got to really think: ‘Wait a minute, all those customers are already on Facebook’, and the question for them is: do you compete against Facebook or do you actually migrate all your stuff to Facebook and I think the answer is to migrate, because who professionally do I want to meet that doesn’t already have a Facebook account?”
Mr Nguyen cited the success of BranchOut, a similar service to LinkedIn that has been growing rapidly as a Facebook app.
Color’s app on Facebook (it will also exist as a Facebook-linked app on Android and iOS devices) adds a few features not present in the original and not available yet through Facebook’s own photo app, such as the way it groups friends and your own photos together.
The key new feature though is “Visits”. Friends, whether or not they use Color, can receive alerts on their news feeds, which are becoming increasingly real-time with features like the new news ticker. The alerts say that you are available for a Visit and clicking on them allows the person to see current live video activity on your phone.
There is no audio and the video comes from the outward-facing camera on the phone, so it’s a limited experience at the moment. It’s also limited in who can try it out – Color is giving the app to only 100 journalists plus students at Harvard University – probably a good idea as it works out the kinks and tries to make sure its second attempt at social does not flop like the first.
