I agree with other commentators that given their initial raise, the company has a number of 'chances' to find the right mix which connects with their user base.
That being said, back when everyone was reading "Snow Crash" and trying to be the guy/gal who created the metaverse, there was some good research into just what sort of 'group event' you could reasonably hold in a network space. (sadly they don't pop up easily on citeseer but they were in the late 90's early 00's about network group meeting events and the people congregating via digital networks).
The bottom line of the research was that it was really hard to build a workable mesh network protocol (basically which provided any to any connectivity / traffic amongst a modest sized group) in the presence of any traffic loss whatsoever.
One of the outcomes of that research was what most people think of as CDNs which push audio/video content amongst a number of servers and try to distribute the load of "Large" events. A more or less practical example was the 40 user 'raid' that the MMORPG World of Warcraft started with, provided co-ordinated events amongst 40 individual users located across the globe. It had a hard time pulling it off but was successful. 100 or 200 users in the same 'area' often killed the servers.
Color is shooting for 10's of thousands of people in the same space. This is P2P "gone wild" and not a solved problem by any means.
So kudos for failing fast, now to see what happens next.
That being said, back when everyone was reading "Snow Crash" and trying to be the guy/gal who created the metaverse, there was some good research into just what sort of 'group event' you could reasonably hold in a network space. (sadly they don't pop up easily on citeseer but they were in the late 90's early 00's about network group meeting events and the people congregating via digital networks).
The bottom line of the research was that it was really hard to build a workable mesh network protocol (basically which provided any to any connectivity / traffic amongst a modest sized group) in the presence of any traffic loss whatsoever.
One of the outcomes of that research was what most people think of as CDNs which push audio/video content amongst a number of servers and try to distribute the load of "Large" events. A more or less practical example was the 40 user 'raid' that the MMORPG World of Warcraft started with, provided co-ordinated events amongst 40 individual users located across the globe. It had a hard time pulling it off but was successful. 100 or 200 users in the same 'area' often killed the servers.
Color is shooting for 10's of thousands of people in the same space. This is P2P "gone wild" and not a solved problem by any means.
So kudos for failing fast, now to see what happens next.