There’s much wrong with Color’s pool party ad. It’s creepy, unrealistic and brings back all kinds of memories of the first season of the OC (I was forced to watch it, ok?). Nothing good can come of a steamy make out session with an odd number of people. Maybe Color is targeting jilted third wheels with nothing to do but broadcast their awkward presence at someone else’s party.
But most of all, I spent the whole spot worried about the phone doing the filming. Kid, don’t you know what happens when an iPhone gets even slightly damp?! You’re in a pool, you moron!
Color only makes sense if you think of it as an attempt to do for video what Twitter did for blogging, and Instagram did for photos. Those guys crafted a package around the smallest possible unit of interestingness. That packaging made sharing frictionless, because it created a fluid tool, yes, but even more because you knew it wouldn’t take long, so you actually decided to do it.
For Twitter, that package is of course the 140 character limit, but also plumbing like URL shorteners, hashtags, and other language conventions (thnk u SMS) that make that limit usable. Instagram already had the concise unit of the photo, but the filters and Polaroid square added a sheen that made individual photos shareable . Flickr always felt to me like it was as much about albums, which is also how I grew up thinking about photos. Instagram broke out the individual photo.
Those restrictions don’t just allow sharing. Like any good artistic constraint, they stimulate creation, too.
So how’s Color’s packaging of video? First, sound (Color has none). Having no sound forces a certain passivity, which in theory should help keep you in the moment. I like that spirit, but the disruption’s already happened as soon as you get your phone out. Maybe the 30 second limit by telegraphing that the intrusion is temporary, but how would people know you’re filming through Color and not a regular video app?
Second, live. Compared to photos, the real barrier for video is editing, encoding, uploading and watching your hard drive fill up. Making it live cuts all out, but I think may also reflect something more fundamental. While writing this, I realized that I naturally think in terms of sharing files – so naturally sharing a piece of text or self contained photo is the same as sharing a self contained video (whether five seconds, or five minutes). Each shared item is just another event in my activity stream. But isn’t video itself already a series of events?
I think what Color has recognized is that sharing a video in your stream isn’t the same as sharing a streaming video. The unit isn’t the video, it’s the frame, or, ultimately, the moment. Sometimes, you should share a series of photos or tweets. Other times, maybe it’s a series of moments within a single video. Sometimes it should be asynchronous, a conversation held over days and weeks, sometimes it needs to be synchronous. Perhaps Color will fill a niche – either way it’ll be a (costly) experiment to learn from.
