I'll cut through the piles of snark that I knew would inevitably show up on this thread and say I now understand why these guys got so much venture capital. This idea, and the previous one they had, while maybe not runaway successes, are damn clever. Yes, it's more social-such-and-such, but they are really taking some very unique approaches here, and with 40M in the bank it's clear they're going to keep iterating until they do find success.
There have been plenty of times where I've witnessed something that I wished I could've shared with a few friends. When I see something crazy happen, my first instinct is to tell someone about it. It's the equivalent of tapping a buddy on the shoulder and saying "woah, dude, over there. Look!"
If I get tapped on the shoulder by this color app you can bet I'll check it out. I've got 30 seconds.
At any rate, I find it disheartening to constantly see so many negative comments about everything color.com does. It smacks of so many sour grapes.
But you've just had the exact opposite knee-jerk reaction to the one you were commenting on -- by assuming that we're all "sour grapes". Instead, you could consider that our criticism of Color is legitimate. I think a reason a lot of us are skeptical is that if you took Color's business plan and general idea and applied to YC/TechStars/any VC, you would probably get polite looks of boredom and stifled yawns. We've also been hearing of a somewhat cynical underlying purpose to an otherwise fluffy mobile app, i.e., that it was meant to be a "data mining platform", which doesn't exactly breed goodwill from people who are trying to create consumer-centered products.
So why again does Color deserve any slack from (what I feel is rightly deserved) criticism?
I should have clarified that I meant a lot of the criticism sounds like sour grapes, not all. The point I want to make is that if it wasn't public knowledge how much money these guys took, I think the reaction on HN to these ideas would be very different. My guess is that the 40M scandal makes it pretty much impossible for these guys to get a fair shake in the developer community.
Nitpick: you might call that envy or schadenfreude, but it's not sour grapes. Sour grapes would be if someone were talking down the desirability of $40 million itself.
There have been plenty of times where I've witnessed something that I wished I could've shared with a few friends. When I see something crazy happen, my first instinct is to tell someone about it. It's the equivalent of tapping a buddy on the shoulder and saying "woah, dude, over there. Look!"
If I get tapped on the shoulder by this color app you can bet I'll check it out. I've got 30 seconds.
At any rate, I find it disheartening to constantly see so many negative comments about everything color.com does. It smacks of so many sour grapes.