Path 2 – My thoughts
Dave Morin’s company has just launched a new and improved version of their app, Path – a mobile social network; in which you share details of your life with those that you are closest too… eradicating the 600+ friends on Facebook… down to a maximum of 150 people. The approach that Path is taking certainly is a novel one – and one that I do agree with, how many of your friends on Facebook have you never spoken too? If you are anything like me, I am sure there are quite a few. And yet unless you manage your friends lists (which can take hours) they are all receiving your most personal updates about your location, likes and photos.
Early figures from the relaunch are promising, seeing 30x the number of daily active users, growing from 10k to 300k in the first 2 weeks of December 2011 – and rumoured to be downloaded 100k times a day. Pretty impressive figures.
The refreshed version is certainly visually compelling – a lot of work has evidently went into making it look nice. Although it must be said that I found the navigation to be rather confusing and it did take a few minutes to get my head around the whole package.
With regard to who has invested in Path, the application has a lot of prominent backers: Index Ventures, Founders Fund, Kevin Rose, SV Angel etc. – raising a total of $11.2 million in two rounds.
But now for the harsh reality, will the post launch spike be just that – a spike? Or will it continue to attract and hold users on a daily basis? For me, I think the early adopters will hold onto it and use it for the next few months; but as for using it on a daily basis – I think users are always going to return to Facebook – people simply have too much invested within it to get up and go. After a month or so of using it I now rarely login to Path to let it know that I have woken up or to let it know which song I am listening too (which should really be built in as automatic…).
I’m certainly interested to see what features the team at Path are currently working on – hopefully something substantial enough to maintain the user interaction.
