Path 3 is out | Hacker News Reader

Path 3 is out

blog.path.com

48 pointsnbashaw50 comments

They really should have released the chat portion as a standalone app. It's not consistent with their digital journal concept. Now the app feels heavy, crammed, and confusing.

That being said, they did a beautiful job implementing chat and in my opinion it blows every other messaging app (ex. groupme) out of the water. I just wish they had released it as it's own app.

My thoughts exactly. Just tried registering a new account on the "new" path and it left me confused and unsure of what to do next, feeling especially empty as well.

I'll get excited about stickers and a store when there's an API to back up the years of content I'm generating in Path. I'll even use the store to pay for access to the API.

Sent a support request over the weekend asking directly, hope they've just been too busy with the release to respond.

You can also post your request here, which they monitor quite frequently http://pathtest.uservoice.com/forums/192337-feature-requests

This is starting to look an awful lot like a ripoff of the Japanese program LINE. But hey, if it works it works.

http://line.naver.jp/en/

I really liked Path. Beautiful app, great mobile experience, but the fact is that I couldn't get into it because none of my friends are on there. I wish they would join, because I much prefer using Path on my phone to facebook. But alas, my friends barely have time for two social networks (Facebook/Twitter (synced, so really one), and a few on Instagram.)

Exactly the same issues I've had with Path.

thanks for posting. here to answer any questions if you guys have them.

Dave, I am an early adopter. I love technology, I love trying out new technology, new apps, and love when sites launch redesigns.

However, I was unable to use Path for any considerable length of time. I would open it up every day and say "Wow that's beautiful", play with the UI a bit, and that was it. I never really truly "engaged" with the app. It seemed the only reason I opened it up was to admire its beauty.

True, I don't have many friends on there (I think I had 4 or 5, of which only 1 used it regularly). But that hadn't stopped me from engaging with 4square for a while, or any of the other apps out there. What I'm saying is, although I don't use 4sq anymore, when I did use it, I really got into it for a certain period of time.

Now if Path can't attract someone like me (who should be the easiest demographic to attract) how do you plan to grow the service? Now, while it's true that you shouldn't optimize for users, but rather, optimize for the experience, how does this particular experience offer me something more that I can't already get from Facebook or Twitter or Instagram? What is it that I'm getting that would make me say "Hey I am going to spend x amount of my limited time in a day to use this app" (keeping in mind that I'm an early adopter and that I'm more inclined to spend more of my finite time per day on things like this)?

Now let's assume Path did offer me more value for something FB or Twitter or Instagram couldn't do as well. Sometimes "good-enough" trumps "the best", and this holds especially when all my friends are on the "good-enough" service, which actually makes it the best service for my needs (bear with me on the logic). Now again, although network effects are strong and you shouldn't be scared to fight them, this brings us back to the question of value-add. You mentioned elsewhere that 'families' and other close groups was a popular use-case, but this puts the burden of recruitment on the user doesn't it? Wouldn't the user have to see enough of a value add to justify the time and effort it would take to get their close groups on a service (and how does this type of behavior scale to a more casual or mainstream audience?).

I'm just unable to see the short term vision, and I'm certainly unable to see the long term vision. While this usually means you're doing something right, in this instance, you're competing in a completely saturated market dominated by network effects never seen before in the history of the world. All of this is even before we ask perhaps the most important questions of all; "How do we make money?". Which, I'm fully prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt for now, because I think the other ones are more pressing for the actual service (excluding the business part of it).

How do you plan to address these kinds of tough tough questions moving forward? I'm sure these are the things you think about each and every day, and I'm sure your team is working incredibly hard to answer them with every blood sweat and tear that they exude, but I'd like to know how you personally plan to address these questions and realities.

Now with full disclosure, I'm just a kid, still in school studying Computer Science, and have no where near the amount of experience you do with building services and companies around those services. I'm curious how someone with your experiences approaches these kinds of questions.

How did you folks decide to proceed with private messaging as the next big feature? (It might seem like a natural next step, but with many apps offering messaging and Path seemingly alright with not having it for a while, it seem logical not to too).

A pat on the back on whoever came up with the tick button in messaging. Awesome. Would love to know how that came about too.

Rotating setting gear now? Please stop preemptively copying what we do ;)

I actually love the app for a personal journal that backs up privately with Facebook -- i.e. it posts to Facebook but posts from the app are made private automatically via the privacy settings...it's sweet and I can still make things public on Facebook to share if I want with family/friends

EDIT: my only current gripe is the inability to post on the desktop -- even if it was a simple browser extension where I post text updates, the ability to type on my laptop while @ work or something is something I value (and according to some of the comments here, may be a larger phenomenon)

Wow. There's a lot of these sticker based chat apps coming out at the moment. LINE was the first I used on a regular basis.. There's also COM and Kakao in japan.. Who was the first to popularize it?

we're not sure who was first, but we believe it is a new and important use case on the mobile internet. reducing what used to take 10 or more messages down into a single click. as far as i know, emoji was invented in japan, popularized by apple, and stickers have been popularized by many of the experiences in asian markets.

I don't know if it was the first, but LINE is pretty insanely popular in Asia right now. I have friends from Taiwan, Japan, and China who use it, and a few of them all but insist on communicating that way!

Kakao is pretty ubiquitous on Korea too. I like the look of path but unfortunately its nigh impossible to choose your social network - it's just whatever gets adopted by the majority. I wouldn't choose to use kakao but since a lot of my contacts use it I kind of have to!

I went and joined. It said it could get my pic from Facebook. Great. Then it went on to request a bunch of other stuff (including posting) all of which I denied. Fine. I come back to see my "moments" in Path pre-filled and littered with my Facebook timeline. I don't want that stuff from years ago, I never gave you permission to cross post them (well, not in good faith), and I want to remove them. I can't. Or it's damn hard to find out how.

The reason I will never even consider trying Path again is the fact that I am still receiving text message invites from when my wife briefly signed up a year ago. Better yet, the last one came through at midnight. I'm pretty sure she cancelled her account and would never give an app my cell number so it leads me to question whether or not Path did actually delete all of the contact information they stole last year.

The idea of private messaging, with the ability to push your location with a single click (for example when running late, or just trying to find each other in a crowded place) is pretty smart. I wish iOS made that simpler and a core part of Messages app, instead of the juggling act with Maps.

WhatsApp has this feature. Very handy

this was a pretty important part of the utility we were working towards. both with one-click location, and with stickers, we wanted to create one-click utilities that reduce what used to be 10 messages down to one.

You can message anyone you share a common friend with. For a network that considers itself personal and private, I believe the user should be able to choose who has the ability to message them.

Stickers?!?!? Seriously?

C'mon Richard - your employer can do better than this.

Do you have a particular issue with stickers? I hate to quote pg here but his quote is too apt:

"Don't be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that's a good sign." [http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html]

Do you have a particular point to make about why stickers are not going to work beside the fact that they may feel childish on first impression?

Stickers are a brilliant move. Have you even heard of Line? What makes Line so popular? Stickers.

If Path becomes the Line of EU/US they will dominate the market.

I have never heard of Line. Why are stickers brilliant? Are they brilliant because they will entice younger user adoption?

I have ZERO interest in applying a sticker to ANYTHING - so I clearly can't choose the cup in front of you...

Are the stickers donated by the artists to Path? It almost looks that way with the long Bios after that $1.99 sticker price.

I used to use path around v1, but am struggling to find my use case for it since. So who is their core userbase?

I use Path regularly to stay in touch with my close friends I think the interface is beautiful. My Facebook has a ton of people on it, including many relatives whom I feel bad turning down but basically do nothing but share quotations and cute animal pics. I use couple to communicate with my fiancé and I use medigram for work. I've found it useful to actually separate groups of people into different apps, be it personal or coworkers, since each app is tailored to how i would like to share information with those people. Also makes it easier to go back and find previous messages from a certain individual.

The question is though, do your close friends use the app?

Yea, they do

our core use case is families who love using path to share privately. we also have a large set of users who are sophisticated quality and privacy-conscious internet users, who have tried every social system over time, and are looking for a high quality, premium, guaranteed private social experience. there are a few other random use cases, like users who use it for an enterprise case of sharing within a company, but those are fairly small.

I think when I signed up originally, used it for a while, then didn't get quite ENOUGH people on it to keep my interest. It became dominated by a handful of "oversharers". None of my close friends I wanted to use it with, ever did. Its a beautiful product, don't get me wrong. Just metcalfe's law didn't work for me here.

kudos for replying dave. next time I'm in the bay area, would be happy to grab a beer and discuss how I used path vs other socNets.

would enjoy doing coffee. let me know when you are in town. i recommend un-friending those folks and recruiting your family. i promise if you get your family on, you will really love it as a personal space for trusted sharing.

>>who are sophisticated quality and privacy-conscious internet users

Well, then.. you just said it :-)

Does anyone else find the open new tab and resize the page for each item in the list to be annoying?

I tried path. In fact I am still trying. It's installed on my phone. But I never use it. Few months ago I would open the app once a few days and there would be nth, from no one. I had 2 friends on it. Turns out I am the only one using this app in my friend circle except the two other who said they uninstalled it.

Undoubtedly it's a beautiful app with really great feature. But I am really not sure if "no web - only mobile/app" is such a brilliant idea. It's not working on this side of the globe at least; but again, this side is never the focus of devs(even those who are in this part of the world or from this part).

I see the number of reviews on Google Play and can't help but think - out of them many are users who installed Path, realized it's a gorgeous app, left a good review and left after remaining alone for sometime and never came back.

Maybe the goal is not only that a persons should have as many friends only as many he actually needs/deservers(150?) but also that path should not be used by more than some number of people path needs/deserves(how many?).

Mobile app churn is insane. Unless you can bring people back into the app every day, or it is a super utility, they will leave. Period.

I run a much smaller app that's bootstrapped, but we have hit top 100 free apps in the App Store before, and have been featured in the section our app is in, so I'd like to think I've learned at least a couple things -- tweens and teens more or less dominate app store explosive growth with regards to social apps.

I think the sticker chat is definitely something that those teens are into. That being said, those same teens mostly just care about followers and likes, which is why Instagram is quite the 100 pound gorilla in the room. Believe it or not, there are tons of folks on IG with tens of thousands of followers, who on twitter or Facebook have 10-100 followers. It is the de-facto mobile social network.

Honestly Path is a damn beautiful app, but because Path does not have enough content, people will leave. Period. It would be interesting to hear what the engagement numbers are on that 6M.

Relevant quick read: Tweens and Instagram http://wisdomsofpearl.tumblr.com/post/44064921127/tweens-ins...

I actually love the idea, and have enough friends (~30) and enough regular-user friends (~15) to make it worthwhile.

However, I couldn't get over how slow the experience is. The app itself is snappy enough (well, 2.x was; 3.0 appears to have slowed down a bit). The network communication is terrible. Loading anything takes way longer than my patience allows, and far too often I get an error message stating that the app was unable to contact Path.

It's simply unacceptable, especially for a mobile-only service. I don't have latency problems with the mobile apps for Facebook, Twitter, or Google+. Just Path.

For that reason (and also because the checkin feature just stopped working, claiming it could never find my location), I uninstalled it last August and gave up. I just reinstalled to see what 3.0 is like, and still find the same problems. Tried 3G, tried WiFi, and it's so ridiculously slow, and I still get timeouts every now and then.

I think the app is beautiful and has great UX, and loved being able to tag people, tag locations, and even mirror selectively to Foursquare, Twitter, and Facebook. But using it was (and I'm afraid still is, though I'll give it a few days; at least the check-in feature appears to be working properly again) just a horribly frustrating experience.

path was designed to be a deeply personal social experience. if you take the time to recruit 8 people it will be a great experience for you. i usually recommend that people start with their family first, as the core use case we tend to serve is families wanting to stay closer.

Dave, I really want to use Path, but my closest friends and family either don't have an Android or iOS device, or can't be bothered to join a new social network.

You know what we use instead? Whatsapp. If it were pitched to us as a social network, we'd have passed but free international messaging (at a time no other app did)? Sign us all up!. It's fast, it's simple, it's our private social network.

Maybe with Path's addition of messaging, things will change. But if you could bring your app to Blackberry, that would be a huge help.

Dave, do you have any tactics to help people recruit 8 more people? Or recruit the family? This sound like the most important issue raised here and still something that only depends on word of mouth. Actually is "let's encourage new users to recruit 8 more people, preferentially among their family" part of the grownth strategy?

I went for "please sign up on Path and add me as a friend because unlike on Facebook, there are some things that I share which I really sincerely would like YOU (and not every other random person) to see". I've got my family and closest friends on Path now, about 12 people in total, most of whom add content regularly and I'm happy :)

Having said that, as much as I like Path, I do sometimes feel like I'm doing them a favour promoting it so aggressively, and the favour hasn't quite been returned yet.

I tried that use case several times, I really dig the vision. It never sticks for me though, I don't get enough value added. Especially for my parents, Path is too complex, and a family whatsapp group serves much of the same function.

I'll keep trying Path once every few months, maybe one day it will stick.

dave, I tried :-)

Honestly it doesn't work. It's not sth that's filling a gap. They have Twitter/Facebook/IG (very few are still into Orkut :P) blah-blah. So, they just won't use it.

It's not everyone who hates those farmville updates, spam links etc (like me or many others). Most are just fine with it. AAMOF most of my friends enthusiastically re-share those bs videos(some are not even videos). Taste for a minimal and clean experience is sth very scarce.

All this happens on desktop, in a browser. Not in the mobile app. Mobile app just a link for them(and for me too) to look at sth new and very interesting(if there at all) and then use the app extensively on the desktop.

Actually I am not very positively hopeful about apps like WhatsApp either. It's not uniform. Hell, I would rather chat with GTalk everywhere - both desktop and phone, rather than WhatsApp on phone and then Gtalk on desktop. I love the idea of keeping messaging/chat separated from mail but it needs to come everywhere.

Only apps I successfully converted many in my circle with are Dropbox, Astrid/Any.do, Evernote(maximum)/SimpleNote(because of the very good Windows app Resoph), WhatsApp, Pocket etc - because they filled a gap more or less.

that's cool. we'll keep going and hope to win you as a user at some point :) appreciate your feedback.

Dave. My immediate family, wife, and grandma use path for basically our entire communications. We love it, brought us closer together.

One product note. I like path because it is only my immediate family, so the suggesting friends thing is a little annoying (because I think it will be less valuable to me of I add more people).

Wow, I wasn't even thinking about that. I know I'm not "every person" but at work I almost exclusively use Facebook on the desktop. I rely on it for a lot of communication that would take a lot longer to do on mobile. If Path doesn't have that, I really can't use at as a primary social network. Instagram on the other hand is all about photos I took on my phone and short comments. For a more robust network I need a desktop much of the time.

I don't think being mobile only is Path's problem. Plenty of social networks like Instagram and WhatsApp have flourished without a webpage. For most people, Path doesn't offer anything they don't get from Facebook, or Twitter, or Foursquare, or Instagram, so they stop posting or checking the app.

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