Earlier in the week, I read on TechCrunch, about a company that refused to sell to Google for $100 million. As it turns out this company makes an iOS application, called Path. After reading the article, I checked out the company's web site, and watched the demonstration video. I was intrigued by the idea — I think that having a small, private social network of my friends, where all we do is share photos with each other, could be pretty cool. I think it would be nice to be able to drop into the Path application, and quickly get a visual update on what a select group of my friends are up to. As opposed to Facebook, which is a garbage can of status updates, wall post, game updates, advertisements, and the occasional photo.
So, I of course downloaded the app, invited some friends, and got to taking photos:
My photo taking experience has only been okay. While the application looks nice, and has some decent animations, there are problems. Path doesn't let you associate arbitrary text with a photo, instead it allows you to choose a person, a place, and a thing to associate with the photo. In practice, I find this to be a bit slower than just banging out a short description on the virtual keyboard.
But even worse, is the feedback from my friends, that without their express written permission, follows.
@sreitz says:
Already this Path thing is stupid. I turned off the location feature - because I never want my location posted on any social media site ever - so now I can't add pictures that I have in my camera roll. To add pics I have to take pictures with the app. That is dumb because not every picture you take is worth posting.
I also hate that it's 100% app driven. I get that it's for people "on the go" but you really should be able to edit and add on the web.
Initial verdict: laaaaame!
@kvstumph says:
And in a later e-mail:You'll have to talk at me about this Path thing. It is requesting that I give my phone number in order to sign up. That's going to be a hard sell.
... at the moment I have determined that Path is evil. It was pushing all your photo updates as notifications to my e-mail account even though I had not even signed up yet. I signed up with a fake phone number just so that I could change my account settings to disable certain notifications.
So, it looks like for me, Path is DOA. I still think that there is a real opportunity in this space, however, at this juncture Path is just too annoying in too many ways for it to stick. And it looks like I'm not the first one to pan this app (in fact, I'm quite late to the party).
In summary, they should have taken Google's $100 million payday, kicked out an Android app, and then quit, as rich millionaires.
-Andy.