For me, the brilliant idea behind Color, (which they did absolutely not realize in their app), is the idea of an elastic social network.
In real like, friendship isn't binary. It's a scale of how close we are, what we talk about, what we share in common, etc. If you came up with a social network that would figure out who your friends are based on how often you talked, hung out, what you talked about etc., I'd call you a genius. A social network where there's no awkward friend requests to accept or reject. A social network that shows me feed items based on how much I currently care about the person and the kind of content...
Absolutely, I think this is exactly the BIG idea that the VCs saw that others didn't really get. I would add that I don't even think it's about "friends" in your elastic social network, it is that the social network exists based on the context (where you are, who you're with, what you're doing) regardless of whether the other person knows/friends you or not. There is a shared thread that is tied together by a shared experience and Color was trying to capture that.
In real like, friendship isn't binary. It's a scale of how close we are, what we talk about, what we share in common, etc. If you came up with a social network that would figure out who your friends are based on how often you talked, hung out, what you talked about etc., I'd call you a genius. A social network where there's no awkward friend requests to accept or reject. A social network that shows me feed items based on how much I currently care about the person and the kind of content...