TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

This is Color’s business model:

Advertising through the app. We’re going to build a intelligent system that allows businesses to participate with their customers. So when you walk into a restaurant and you use Color, and they’re also customers through a self-service Web interface — or actually a self-service iPad interface — every time you walk into the restaurant, your [first] name will show up with your picture. The maitre d’ or receptionist will know who you are, they’ll be able to welcome you, they’ll know the last time you were here, they’ll be able to see pictures if you took them here. They’ll be able to provide you better service than they’ve ever before, that’s going to drive up their revenue by increasing repeat business because we always want to go back where we feel welcome.

Let’s set aside privacy objections for a moment here.

This depends on a large, active user-base to work. A restaurant, or some other company, would only pay for this sort of service if a large number of their customers use the application, or would possibly use it. If they don’t, or can’t be encouraged to, there’s not much benefit.

But acquiring a large user-base requires Color to be a useful service all on its own, and at this point, it isn’t. There’s nothing for me to do with Color right now because for me to benefit from it, a large number of people around me need to be using it, too. There’s no immediate benefit to using Color, which makes it very difficult for the service to take off.

Instagram is immediately useful because users enjoyed taking photos and applying filters to them, whether they had any friends using the service or not. That stickiness gave Instagram the ability to gather users, because people didn’t stop using it after using it for the first time.

There is no equivalent feature in Color. It’s entirely dependent on others using it and those users being around you. It’s puzzling why Nguyen thinks Color will be the social network that makes this business model a reality when they don’t seem to even have a way of building up a respectable user-base.