Webb's favourite colour...
My colleague, Mr Webb, has done it again. Today's project is an attempt to find The Web's favourite colour. Here's how it works - you take a photo of your favourite colour with your camera phone and send it via MMS to avit@historicalfact.com. Then behind the scenes, the colours in the photo are completely averaged out, creating a representation of your colour that can be given a hex value. All the colours sent in are averaged out and the background of the page comes gradually to represent the web's favourite colour...
At the moment, the site's quite sparse - and the favourite colour appears to be (rather unfortunately) grey. But I get the impression that there's much more work being done. Obvious things that leap to mind would be a display of the most recently sent in pictures and rolling averages of the last hour, last day, last month. Matt's probably way ahead of me on all that stuff though, so I'll shut up before I embarrass myself further...
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
..but will it be web-safe?
→ Posted by: paul at July 24, 2003 10:55 AM
Surely this is the MMS users' favourite colour? Can you email in pictures?
→ Posted by: ChrisH at July 24, 2003 11:26 AM
You'd have to ask Matt about that, but I can't see that it would be a problem...
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at July 24, 2003 11:30 AM
Yup, email works too but I want to bias it towards phones so it's more "see a colour, send it". I'd love to make it proper MMS, but don't know how to go about getting use of a gateway...
First issue from this: it's not apparent enough that the colour of the photo moves the average colour along the spectrum (so green plus purple can mean blue). More visual feedback on that required. (The spectrum thing is to avoid everything turning to grey/beige, and to allow brightness too.)
Next to do apart from that: time-based averages (hour, day, week) or maybe just last 3/5/20, most recent pictures (blurred out for decency). Then per-user slices. And then to see what happens when the spambots pick up this email address...
→ Posted by: mattw at July 24, 2003 11:45 AM
This is such a wonderful idea. Wish I thought of it. :) Please don't make it MMS only, I for one send all my phone-photos using ordinary email and GPRS.
→ Posted by: Manne at July 24, 2003 12:37 PM
Small annoying thing with the favourite colour web page: Just now the "latest.jpg"-image crashed my Internet Explorer image handling. This is apparently something that happens due to extra information available in some jpegs that IE canät handle. Perhaps such information can be stripped out before the latest image is stored to disk?
More on the subject:
http://www.hultberg.org/mt-linklog/archive/000155.html
→ Posted by: Manne at July 24, 2003 1:34 PM
Would be easier to do it with a spider looking at HTML for hex triplets.
→ Posted by: brownshoe at July 24, 2003 2:36 PM
Yup... not loading in IE6.
→ Posted by: Michael at July 24, 2003 2:37 PM
I've taken out the latest photo for the moment incase this hits anyone else. I'll look at how to strip out this extra info too. Thanks!
→ Posted by: mattw at July 24, 2003 5:06 PM
The favourite colour is more green now. Green objects always draw my attention. Personally I like green and grey and I used to have more green on my web pages. Now I'm using grey and a range of colours.
Maybe grey was popular colour because it goes well with a range of other colours. Grey is a tint of black and white and an important colour for the artistic element of tone and within monotone images.
→ Posted by: ABliss at July 25, 2003 3:11 AM
Great idea.
An interesting variation on this might be to calculate the webdesigner's favourite colour: for example put a search in the Google viewer ( http://labs.google.com/gviewer.html ) and calculate the avarage colour of the screen every 10 seconds.
→ Posted by: luna papa at July 29, 2003 3:24 PM