Color doesn't do the greatest job explaining the new feature on their website...so let me explain a bit more (I've played with the app)
Basically Color's built a way to be a vouyer into your friend's world. You request to "visit" a friend via the iPhone app, and if they hit accept, it sends you a direct video feed of what they're seeing right now (no audio). It also posts that feed onto Facebook so any of their friends can see the feed. It can last as short or as long as you'd like.
When I tried it out, I got to see people in Paris, Las Vegas and SF in the span of three minutes. It was a surreal experience.
There are more details in the article we wrote ( http://mashable.com/2011/09/22/color-for-facebook/ ), but the essential point is that you don't have to use it -- your FRIENDS ask you to use it, and thus you use it to appease your friends. It's very voyeuristic and that leads to a lot of interesting conversations.
Okay, so you kissed up to Color's PR team, got access to the app early, participated in a carefully staged demo, and it seemed cool?
The problem here is that you have no incentive to tell us that Color sucks. Doing so means that you'll never get access to any previews or exclusives from them. Meanwhile, since we're just a bunch of anonymous nobodies, you can bullshit us about how Color's stupid idea about personal video broadcasting is "surreal."
Any idea why the lack of audio (besides the voyeury-creep factor audioless video grants)? This will be a perplexing omission for a lot of users who are already familiar with personal video chat apps like Tango/Oovoo/Google+ Hangouts et al.
This doesn't make much sense -- other audio/video sharing systems (GTalk / etc) would experience the same problem then.
I believe you are referring to the one-party / all-party telephone recording laws, where in some states all parties to the call must know the call is being recorded. This is not relevant for this software program (unless it is being used to stream audio from a phone call...)
But the "hosting" party must click Accept to begin recording, thus they'd know they themselves were being recorded. In addition, at this point, the onus is on the recorder (as they were likely instructed in the Terms of Service they accepted), not the app, to ensure that the folks they're recording agree to be on camera/recorded.
Basically Color's built a way to be a vouyer into your friend's world. You request to "visit" a friend via the iPhone app, and if they hit accept, it sends you a direct video feed of what they're seeing right now (no audio). It also posts that feed onto Facebook so any of their friends can see the feed. It can last as short or as long as you'd like.
When I tried it out, I got to see people in Paris, Las Vegas and SF in the span of three minutes. It was a surreal experience.
There are more details in the article we wrote ( http://mashable.com/2011/09/22/color-for-facebook/ ), but the essential point is that you don't have to use it -- your FRIENDS ask you to use it, and thus you use it to appease your friends. It's very voyeuristic and that leads to a lot of interesting conversations.