Working or spending a lot of time online makes sharing through social networking sites and apps very important, as many of the people you interact with don’t physically live anywhere near you, so if you want to share with them, you need to do it virtually.

There are plenty of ways to do this and recently, photo-sharing apps have emerged as one of the industry’s favorites, with PicPlz, Instagram and Path all being popular variations on a theme.  Today a new entry has emerged with a bank account stuffed full of 41 million dollars worth of investment.  It’s called Color and comes from Lala creator Bill Nguyen.

The idea is simple and quite forward-thinking, as it imagines a very open future.  It’s a cross between a scrapbook and a diary which you populate with photos and videos, all of which are publicly viewable by other Color users within a 50ft radius of your location; and vice-versa.  Content can be liked and commented on, and the app will build up a network of people who you interact with.

But then, you probably know all this, as you follow all of the well-known start-up commentators on Twitter, who’ve spoken about little else this morning.  What’s that?  You don’t follow them?  That’s OK, because it’ll be the first thing all your iPhone or Android owning friends will tell you about when you meet them at that cool coffee bar.  What?  Your friends own feature phones?

I don’t live or work in Silicon Valley, I don’t know anyone else with an iPhone and only a couple with Android phones; none of whom can be bothered with Twitter, Foursquare or any other established social networking tool.  I’m fairly sure my mundane existence isn’t uncommon.

Color is a very interesting app, and has shunned ‘friending’, passwords and security – opening itself up to all users inside 50ft of you and your phone.  You know what, I bet even if it was 50 miles I’d still struggle to find anyone using it.  It’s frustrating in a way, as I feel the app is aimed at someone like me, but I don’t get any value from it due to its restrictions.  It’s a lovely idea, but I simply don’t think the world is anything like the one Color imagines.

So what’s the solution?  Change friends or make new ones based on their smartphone preference?  Move to Silicon Valley?  No, it’s much simpler than that; I’ll just not bother with Color for another six months, then open it again to see if anyone has caught up.  They won’t have done of course, as like several of its peers, Color is for a group of people who just don’t live in the same world I do.

What life with Color is supposed to look like:

What life with Color actually looks like: