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Comment by pork | Hacker News Reader

Wow! Video without audio, and I have to join to watch! They've just invented a less interesting Youtube, without audio, and non-public access. Well done on an ... interesting ... pivot.

EDIT: this one is for the files of social networks that hobble a feature of other networks to try and stand out. In this case, however, it's audio associated with a video. Um....really?

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I generally have trouble judging the use or viability of services like this. My first reaction was to call it useless because I doubt that I will ever use something like this. But I've said the same thing about other services, most recently Instagram. Apparently I'm not in their market.

Now looking past whether or not I will ever use this (I won't) there isn't as far as I know much in the way of social video sharing. While there is of course Youtube, Color seems to place an emphasis on easy seamless sharing, something that people seem to want.

Some things I feel that would make the product far more compelling would be audio, and privacy. While I haven't logged in, it seems that videos shot through Color are available on the site for browsing Youtube style. I would much prefer directly sharing them to networks of my choice.

> there isn't as far as I know much in the way of social video sharing

SocialCam has been nailing this pretty good, IMHO.

http://socialcam.com

Don't get me wrong, I'm just as cynical as the next HN'er and there's no doubt that Color still isn't worth a single percent of the millions of funding dollars it gobbled up, but...

Twitter defined themselves by trading features and verbosity for accessibility and rapid consumption. And they seem to be doing doing pretty well with that.

At the very least, it will be interesting to see how this pivot plays out for them.

I take your point, but the Twitter analogy would be a microblogging service that bans the use of articles in messages.

Maybe... or maybe a more appropriate Twitter analogy would be that links to articles weren't automatically linked.

I meant articles as parts of speech, like "the".

I think not having audio makes it easier to use on small mobile devices in a crowded room, like watching at a party or on a subway.

But it's Social! And Facebooky! To not give them money would be like starving a puppy! You wouldn't starve a puppy would you?

Admittedly - it's a puppy that will chew up your credit cards and sell your beans recipe to all comers, but hey, isn't he cuuuute!

I wouldn't get stuck on the lack of audio part. It can't be too far behind.

It's not about it being far behind. Audio isn't a feature; it's something you have to intentionally take away. It seems like an odd choice.

You keep saying that in this thread, but I can't for the life of me imagine why you would launch a live-video product without audio. It just doesn't make any sense, is likely to be taken as the site "being broken", and finally result in a "um..that's dumb" when the fact that audio is intentionally excluded is revealed to the user.

To be blunt, for a video-broadcasting site, frickin' AUDIO isn't a "fringe" feature.

pork, it's not allowing me to reply to your comments so I'll just reply here.

I'm not disagreeing with you that audio is necessary and if it's part of the development plan, it should have been a major priority and I probably wouldn't have launched without it.

With that said, it's an assumption on our part that audio is necessary, even for for short 30-sec videos and they are putting that assumption to the test. Without audio, I don't think it'll work... but who knows. Until you test, you can't tell for sure.

You have to wait to post replies sometimes, depending how many levels down the conversation is. This is a safeguard against threads full of knee-jerk back-and-forth responses, I suppose.

"Video without audio"

I think it possibly might have something to do with federal wiretap laws.

"Electronic eavesdropping is the use of an electronic transmitting or recording device to monitor conversations without the consent of the parties"

"Federal wiretap laws apply to oral, wire, and electronic communications. However, the federal law does not currently regulate silent video communications, such as webcams or other video monitoring without an audio component. "

https://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs9-wrtp.htm

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/03/school-lapto...

Heh. Want to place any bets they built the whole thing audio included and just before launch brought in the lawyers who quickly said WTF? To which the product team said ORLY?

Grandcentral (which was bought by google and is now google voice) had a great feature that when you received a phone call you could record it at any time. That feature was dropped by google. The laws vary by state. The state I used to be in you needed two party consent. The state I am in now only one party has to consent (so you can record your own phone calls in a one party state).

I believe that the same applies to surveillance cameras which is why most of them don't have audio they only have video.

Oh ok, here:

"Recording audio without the persons permission is almost always illegal, that's why our covert cameras don't have microphones. "

http://www.palmvid.com/content/support/legal-information-reg...

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