There is absolutely nothing attractive or exciting about the new app Path promising to be a 'Personal Network.' The only thing it has going for itself is a pretty launch icon. The design in general (what little there is) is well done. The biggest problem is what it is, which lacks the elusive attractor factor. If this app gains any momentum without major changes I will eat my hat!
I know what it promises to do- I read their "Introducing" blog post. The 50 friend limit made my ears perk up and I immediately thought of the Dunbar number, which a paragraph later they cited (in length) as an influencing factor. Golf clap everyone. Part of storytelling is to not say everything all at once- but the fact that they did outline the Dunbar number and its heavy influence on Path, I'm left seeing how one dimensional their creative vision is which leads me to:
Major Fail Reason #1
Why do I want to share my most intimate communications in just one place with one lump of people? It is as though the creators totally misunderstand how human beings actually relate to one another- did they not flip through the popular "Real Life Social Network" that has been floating around the net or were they too entrenched in development already to alter their course?
Yes, according to Dunbar, we are only capable of emotionally storing connections to 150 people. But, those connections are vastly different in the nature of what each relationship means to an individual. If I go out drinking with my best friends and have a fun night I would love to share the photos from that night with my best "peer age" friends (the friends who were there, and not there to experience the fun). However, I certainly would not want to share those photos with my 13 year old sister and my father- both of which are people I would want to count in my intimate 50. This is a failure of understanding of major proportions on Paths part.
Why not go the whole way and give us access to 150- make Dunbar their mascot. If I could create 3 x Streams of 50 relationships or 5 x Streams of 30 relationships, or 15 x Streams of 10 (you get the idea). Then I could invite a relationship to subscribe to one or more of my Streams, that would be a promising start- that I could get behind using (or even helping build). All of which scenarios adhere to Prof. Dunbar's research, yet allow humans to be humans.
Major Fail Reason #2
Look at the four embedded pictures in this article- these are the screens a new user sees upon installing Path. They got everything wrong with what it is supposed to be communicated to a new user, and why a new user wants to use Path at all.
Firstly, humans are social creatures who learn by example, we have these little things called "mirror neurons" that make us copy what others are doing, these are incredibly important. Instagram for instance has a nice grid of "Popular" photos that immediately give one a sense of what I am going to "mirroring" with this tool- uploading awesome artsy photos.
Personally (despite being a designer & techie) when I see a blank screen and a button I feel compelled to do very very little. The Today tab has nothing on it. Remember MySpace, how you automatically had 1 friend and his name was Tom- this activated a whole part of understanding as to why people wanted to use the site- it was about making digital "friends."
I have no idea what the Explore tab is supposed to do or why it starts zoomed all the way out. I suspect it will show little tacks that my relationships post (once I have relationships who are using Path and they do posts). I kept thinking: "Oh, this is where I will see the things people post." But, there is nothing there except an empty map of the world. Why the whole world? Most of my intimate 50 are on the west coast- of course Path doesn't know this information about me, but I bet they'd like to know ;)
The People tab is poorly done. It scans my address book (which is large and cumbersome). I accidentally sent a "share" request to someone I didn't mean to (and I have no idea what they received). Where is the social networking integration? Why does everyone have to start from zero with an avatar and details... oh wait there are no details.
The Profile tab just looks bleak- great I get to upload a picture of my face- at least give me the three fields Twitter provides.
Upon launching Path I felt a sense of emptiness. When I first logged onto the web 13 years ago what was cool about it, was all the things "other people were doing on it." The social networking revolution has brought new paradigms and challenges- the web is not just this big open free for all of random (sometimes interesting) people doing things. Due to social media- the web is also now about my real life being hyper connected digitally in every way I want it to be.
Major Fail Reason #3
It is personal but not private. Path is another closed door company providing a "free" service to coerce people into sharing their (intimate) lives via their channel of distribution. Of course advertisers would be interested Path's data- as it is not the meaningless exchanges between you and 5,000 other people- Path wants the data of you and the 50 most meaningful relationships. Note, how one of their founders is an ex Facebook dude.
In Closing
I want to share my most meaningful data on a "private" and personal platform. Efforts like Diaspora and Status.net and my little effort called Social-Igniter are heading there and hopefully will gain traction with the mainstream. I'd have no problem forking over $5 / month for a well made private social network(s). Frid.ge and Yammer are more in that niche. I had been hoping Path would be headed in this direction... but alas it makes no mention that it is.
