I think the knee-jerk cynicism about valuations and raises is blinding a lot of people on HN. Sure, Color's 41M is a lot, and it is YAPSS (Yet another photo sharing service). But Reading the techcrunch article about it, it sounds like one of those "sum is more than the parts" things, like the iPad or Google search results.
The integration of all the sensors and data to automatically determine your connections and maintain it for you with no work could be huge! Don't be fooled by the fact that it started with photos - that's a convenient vector to start with and fuel growth, but there's nothing stopping them from hooking into phone and sms messages to make the implicit social connections more robust.
I'm not bullish on Color, but I'd take Color with $41M over Path, Instagram, or any of a zillion other sites with their raise. They have a huge chicken-and-egg problem, but isn't that what the money is good for?
Cynicism aside, I kind of get what they're trying to do - minimise the barriers to active participation in social networks (and therefore maximise the effectiveness of targeting) because it figures out things like tagging and networks for you. Unfortunately for them, I think the hurdle of "can I be bothered to join yet another pointless, invasive service" is a bigger one to cross than "can I be bothered to tag all my photos on Facebook". Even with inferior technology, I'd fancy Facebook could build a better model of which friends I associate with the most and where, if they wanted too.
Then there's the problem voiced elsewhere that intentionally collating all that data is just a bit too creepy, and I say that as someone who couldn't care less about Facebook privacy settings and thinks CCTV in public places is generally a good idea.
The integration of all the sensors and data to automatically determine your connections and maintain it for you with no work could be huge! Don't be fooled by the fact that it started with photos - that's a convenient vector to start with and fuel growth, but there's nothing stopping them from hooking into phone and sms messages to make the implicit social connections more robust.
I'm not bullish on Color, but I'd take Color with $41M over Path, Instagram, or any of a zillion other sites with their raise. They have a huge chicken-and-egg problem, but isn't that what the money is good for?