Facebook Blocks Path’s “Find Friends” Access Following Spam Controversy | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Blocks Path’s “Find Friends” Access Following Spam Controversy

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58 pointsLightning35 comments

When Path first came out, I was frankly, kind of excited to try it out. I thought with Path's sleek UX/UI, the 150 friend limit being inspired by actual psychology research, and how it was "branded" to not be the next Facebook, but to run in unison with users' existing networks, that this was something that was going to explode.

They pretty much ruined their chances of that happening. It never ceases to amaze me that developers/companies think that they can spam users to increase traction. Users know when they are being spammed which leaves an extremely bitter taste in user's mouths.

"Twitter’s userbase skews more toward early adopters who might be interested in Path than Facebook users." This might be true, but I think people are going to remember this. Maybe it would work, because I could see Path just re-branding into a more intimate version of twitter, but only time will tell. For the most part, I think Path shot themselves in the foot pretty fucking well.

Most companies resort to spam because their growth just isn't happening. Seems more like path is getting desperate as its early hype has long since faded.

They've had incredibly strong growth since the release of Path 3.0 (in Path growth terms that is). They've been growing at 1 million users a week recently. They were also moving consistently into the top grossing apps in the app store.

I agree that spam can be used by companies sometimes in desperation, but there doesn't seem to be much evidence this was the case. Of course, we have no idea what really happened behind the scenes.

  They were also moving consistently into the top grossing apps in the app store.

This is interesting. How is revenue calculated for free apps?

In-app purchase (IAP). Path.app sells stickers and filters.

It's easier to get friends to sign-up for a service when they receive an email saying you've shared something with them, and linking to the app-download page.

That's what was alleged to have happened with blasting invites to people's entire contact list against their will.

http://www.branded3.com/blogs/the-antisocial-network-path-te...

With that said, from a mathematical standpoint it's difficult to see how this could be a widespread thing. If everybody that joins Path had this happen, it'd eventually become a massive problem where everybody with a phone would be receiving these texts (think six degrees of Kevin Bacon) - so I suppose it's possible this isn't happening to all users.

They have definitely been struggling and they will likely see the same churn they've had in the past. If you look at their app charts on App Annie or a similar service you can see it.

According to http://www.factets.com/application/path-LS7TuNU/history, growth has been pretty steady, and is on the rise. Granted only facebook #'s, but should be at least somewhat representative of overall trend.

Not sure if that is independent to, or a result of, their spammy marketing.

They actually started with a 50 friend limit. The problem was when they had it at this, most active users had less then 20 friends they followed with Path...

So they upped it to 150, and now they are seeing users in the 50 range they originally wanted.

I wish they lowered this limit to 15.

    Users know when they are being spammed.

Not always though. I know of a messaging app that has spammed the hell out of my friends. The trick is that it will ask for contact info and then automatically send SMS to all of them asking to install it. Message goes something like, "Hi, I am using <app name> to message for free. Get it from <website>."

Since it looks like it was sent from a friend, it has seem huge growth, at least in my friend circle.

I think this is starting to become an interesting experiment with regards to User Privacy, and Awareness of Privacy. This is the 2nd time that Path has been blasted for shady collection / use of User Data. It reminds me of the saying "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me".

The first time it happened was back in Feb 2012. It was discovered Path would Download the User's entire Address Book, collecting Information about all the User's Contacts without the User's knowledge. Path CEO Dave Morrin apologized, stating "We believe you should have control when it comes to sharing your personal information. We also believe that actions speak louder than words". Here we are, a little over a year later, and Path is at it again. But it does not seem like Path learned anything from the last incident. Once again, Users are complaining about shady use of their Address Book Data.

I am curious to see how the Users react. I've always had a strong stance on User Respect, and I must admit I find this entire scenario a bit distasteful. I think the "Golden Rule" applies; Treat others how you would want to be treated. But even with this said, I question weather the Users even care. My own personal customer validation for unrelated projects seem to indicate that User Awareness of Privacy and issues like this is quite low.

It's actually the third time that's been publicized. Dave Winer blogged about Path's stealing user address books back in 2010.

http://scripting.com/stories/2010/11/15/theTechIndustryIsAVi...

Unfortunately, "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me" does not apply if the product is useful enough. Look at Facebook.

Good.

I was a Path evangelist to all of my friends and family, but once I learned about their spamming tactics, immediately deleted the app and canceled my account. Not necessarily because of the incident, but because of their response to it.

I've also lost a lot of respect for journalist that refused to cover the story because of their ties to Dave, the company, and/or the investors.

Typically I'd be harsh towards Facebook for this, but I don't blame them one bit. That is, if the spam is indeed the reason for this action.

I'd be interested in knowing which journalists you're referring to.

If you build your platform on another platform; You're inevitably going to have a bad time. I don't use Path so I don't know how much of a blow this is to their platform, but it can't be good. Hopefully, Path has enough traction that it can grow without $FB's social graph.

It's not inevitable that you are going to have a bad time. Confirmation bias.

I think the statement "if you're building your platform on another platform; you're at the mercy of the underlying platform" is more accurate.

Facebook and Twitter have changed their Terms of Services/APIs multiple times which has resulted in bad times for Facebook applications like Vintage Camera and MessageMe[1] and Twitter services like Flattr[2].

However, Tapbots has been successful in adapting its Tweetbot client to comply with Twitter's API changes[3]. While the API changes cost Tapbots extra development time to bring Tweetbot up to snuff, their core business was not adversely affected. I don't think Tapbots has a bad time because they make Twitter clients that rely on third-party API access, but they are at the mercy of Twitter continuing to allow third-party API access.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732439280457836...

[2] http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/04/16/flattr-twitter-paym...

[3] http://tapbots.com/blog/news/dont-panic

So I love TapBots and I have paid for all of their mobile apps. When you look at their Twitter products, the amount of software they can sell is restricted by Twitters API limit. If you look at the Tweetbot For Mac[1] post it says:

> If you’ve used the Alphas/Betas and have decided not to purchase, please do us a huge favor and Revoke access; that frees up extra tokens for potential customers.

I don't think it's good when you have an awesome development team like TapBots who makes products that are, in My opinion better than Twitter's native clients, and you're capped to 100,000 device installs "just because". I know it's not "just because"; Twitter needs to become a business and generate revenue, but the same companies that helped build the brand and popularity are now punished.

[1] http://tapbots.com/blog/news/tweetbot-mac

Great point. The API access restriction hasn't stung TapBots yet but the token caps are frustrating and potentially stifling to future growth.

I'm interested to see what Twitter will do when Tweetbot starts to approach the maximum number of tokens allowed. My guess is Twitter will grant Tapbots extra tokens. I think the API restrictions are geared towards preventing new companies from using Twitter's APIs in unintended ways (like Flattr) than shutting down established Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Echofon.

I'm definitely curious to see how Path's growth works out now. It seems that since they are focused on close friends and family that phone contacts will work for this to some extent.

They definitely pose a threat to Facebook's stream quality if they do continue to grow. They could pull an Instagram and take away the Facebook share feature, or make it less useful. Something that could backlash on them, but doesn't seem to have affected Instagram's growth. If they grew too large and did something like this, it could effectively reduce the number of quality posts on Facebook, something you could argue it already suffers from depending on your current Facebook friends and likes.

I like that idea of focusing on quality--I definitely feel like that is something which is lacking on $FB. Although; maybe that's my fault since I'm not training $FB's NLP engine that I don't want to see bad content.

I think the post last week about Path spamming the guys address book[1], although I think it was user error, is not helpful to Path's cause. Like You, I'm interested to see how Path's growth works without $FB.

[1] http://www.branded3.com/blogs/the-antisocial-network-path-te...

Even if they knew this day was guaranteed to come, it still makes a lot of sense for them to have had the feature up to now. A lot of the previous growth has been from this feature.

I totally agree with that. I just think that Path's future becomes questionable if they don't have a contingency plan. It would be interesting to see how much of their new user signups come from $FB. I would imagine that it's pretty high, but I don't know. I just look at other companies that lost their $FB boost and the outcome generally isn't good.

yeah absolutely

My guess is that Path people sat down and decided that nothing good was happening so 2013 was going to be it, either grow and get acquired or shut it down (no Foursquare scenario).

To grow they chose spam and fishy growth numbers in countries like Venezuela. I hope it doesn't work out for them.

Not sure if this is FB punishing Path for bad behavior, or more that they see Path as a potentially credible competitor with Path growing as fast as FB is shrinking

FB hit 1.1 billion the other day as reported in their quarterly earnings -- a growth of 100 million is not exactly "shrinking"

Fair enough, but in developed markets (where the money is) FB is shrinking and Path is growing (and very quickly if one is to believe their numbers). Of course, given FB's user base (most every adult who has access to a computer) there is really only one way to for their numbers to go.

All that being said, FB's priority these days has to be increasing revenues per user (regardless of whether it's desktop or mobile) and for Q1 revenues were $1.33 per user--so there's plenty of room for upside there.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/technology/mobile-efforts-...

In any event, it's hard to root for Path (or even think using their service is a good value proposition) given their nefarious business methods. My main point was that I doubt FB was making it harder for Path to operate purely out of altruistic customer privacy concerns.

Path, as with any Messaging apps that could potentially be successful, are a threat to Facebook.

The other threat is Photos.

If Facebook genuinely saw Path as a competitor they would simply buy it and kill it. I think it's more a case that Path's spamming tactics could have been seen to have Facebook's approval had they not intervened and put an end to it.

I'm not sure they could buy it. Path was offered $100 million early on from Google when they first released and were not getting traction. They rejected it.

David Morin appears to want to build a company for the long term, and so selling to Facebook (his old workplace) to kill the project seems unlikely.

That was two years ago, though. A long time in the life of a highly hyped startup.

>>David Morin appears to want to build a company for the long term, and so selling to Facebook (his old workplace) to kill the project seems unlikely.

What you want and dream, most of the time is different from the reality. Remember that he has investors and employees. Even if investors don't have enough voting shares they can put pressure (at least in the media) and the star employees will bolt to Google and Facebook unless they see $$ signs of a major buyout.

I predict that he will be looking for a face saving exit soon

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