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"Color, the dynamic photo-sharing app that made a splash with its launch yesterday, is already hard at work on the next version of its app.  The update will directly address user criticism about the app's apparent lack of utility when a user's friends aren't nearby.\nThe app, available for iPhone and Android, allows anybody to share their photos or videos with friends and strangers.  The app detects who is nearby and automatically creates groups for sharing visual content.  There is no \"friending\" or \"following\" in Color, though.  All the photos are public, and your circle of friends is determined by algorithm \u2014 based on how often you hang out with a person. It's a concept the company calls the \"elastic network.\"\nThe app is currently number two in the App Store for Social Networking and currently ranks number 26 for Top Free apps, but it has received mixed reviews from users and the media, largely because of a weak user experience when friends aren't nearby.  The startup has also received heat for its eye-popping $41 million in funding, primarily from Sequoia Capital.\nI spoke with Color co-founder and CEO Bill Nguyen about the future of the product.  The former Lala CEO told me 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.\nIn order to get value out of Color someone else has to be nearby using the app. \"Otherwise it's going to make no sense,\" he told me. So the app will feature two major changes when the next update ships: You won't be able to use the app if nobody is nearby, and Color will be changing the distance required for somebody to be considered nearby.\nThe first change is a pretty significant one; if you launch the app in the middle of nowhere, you're essentially going to be locked out.  This is designed to prevent you from opening the app and simply having nothing to do or see.\nThe second update should prevent that scenario from occurring too often.  Nguyen says the app will dynamically calculate the distance required for somebody to be considered \"nearby.\"  Currently, the app searches for anybody within 150 feet of your location.  That number will not be a constant any longer: \"We're going to start adjusting that range based on the density of cities,\" he says.\nFor example, cities like Tokyo and New York won't require a lot of calibration, but Color may determine that your \"dynamic network\" has a radius of half a mile, especially if you live in a spread-out city or smaller town.  The exact distance will be determined on-the-fly, like many of the app's other core features.\nNguyen hopes the new update will land in the app store sometime in the middle of next week.  He says not to expect miracles from this update; there will be many iterations of the app as the company gathers more data on how people utilize the app.\nCheck out our full interview with Color's CEO, where he explains the company's goals in greater detail and defends the company's $41 million funding round.\n\n\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/03/24/color-update/>