Path & The Birth Of The Private Social Network

Path – “The journal of your life,” as they call themselves, is a mobile private social network where you share your life “moments” with only your closest friends. By design, Path limits you to only 150 friends; their mission is dead-set on you sharing with only your closest and best friends. Path isn’t the first social network to take a more private approach to social; Google + has “circles” for specific groups of people in your life, while Twitter & Facebook now have very tight privacy settings that allow you to lock down who sees your content and profile. But still, Path’s approach just feels different – the commitment to privacy & intimacy is in their bones.

A Social Media Boxing Match

Once heralded as Facebook’s biggest threat since MySpace or Twitter, Path’s mainstream success has been mediocre at best. Many of their core users consider it the best thing to happen to social media – a chance to completely start over from scratch.

Path’s biggest critics think the 150 rule is too limiting, the use case too narrow and the effort to remake your entire social graph way too difficult and time-consuming. Two things that no one can disagree with, however, is Path’s incredible design (it’s one of the most gorgeous mobile interfaces I’ve ever seen) or their commitment to user privacy.

The Great Privacy Debate

Path is a very interesting company in that they are basically the “anti-Facebook” to their users; you share incredibly personal and intimate “moments” in your life; be them the music you’re listening to, the movie you just saw, or the time you woke up this morning (more to come on that in a second). The biggest fear with openly sharing this type of information publicly is that eventually the social network you’re active on will turn your private moments and thoughts into advertising dollars.

The best example of this was Facebook’s Beacon fiasco a few years back which involved the automatic publishing of user's data from their browsing of third party sites directly onto Facebook. The issue wasn’t that Facebook knew your habits (say, a 26 year old man was looking movie times or restaurant reviews), but that it was publishing these  events directly on your Facebook Wall without explicit permission – a big privacy no-no.

Data For All

In Path’s very vein of existence, they have taken the complete opposite direction with some of their data and shared it with the world – but not in a way you’d normally think. Path took an interesting approach with one of their more interest-based slices of user social data – they published a completely anonymous study of their users sleep habits.

The study highlights some really interesting, intimate findings, like: Path’s users go to bed after midnight, 12:27am to be exact, rising at 8:24am; they average 7h 56m of sleep a night; women go to bed before men; and the more athletic Path users are, the earlier to bed and the earlier to rise. You can read Path’s full post about Sleep Habits on their blog.

The point here isn’t to vex on the data itself, but discuss what Path has done with this data, publishing an infographic and a blog post on the topic versus creating an advertising product around it. I can’t recall the last time any other social network did something along these lines; imagine if Facebook or Twitter were to publish weekly stats on the most seen film or downloaded album by their users. What Path’s done here is more or less the complete opposite of selling advertising based upon information or intention; it’s returning it to the community in an interesting, enlightening, and educational way.

Will Path Survive?

One concern I have with Path is if it will actually survive. Will their service hit critical mass and become ubiquitous with social networking? All businesses need to grow up one day and make money, so they can keep the lights on and keep fulfilling the needs of their users and advancing their service forward. We just saw the Facebook IPO & Twitter turn up the heat on their advertising products. Where’s Path in all of this? I don’t think it’s the right time for them to even think about this, as they are still heads-down developing and building a product they hope will revolutionize how we live our social media lives.

If Path sounds interesting to you, fire up either the Apple App store or Android Play and give it a whirl.