My First Adventure with Path 2.0 -- Is It Still a Personal Network?

When it launched in November 2010, Path touted itself as The Personal Network: the foil for other sites like Facebook that were overrun with marketers and other non-friends. After a year on the market, Path 2.0 launched in December 2011 with a slew of new updates to make the social network into a Smart Journal for mobile users. I downloaded the app to my Android last week to follow Path in its new direction, and was surprised at where it took me. How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Research has shown that people care about real-world relationships even when they are online. According to a study conducted by Pew Research, the most common reasons Americans join social media sites like Facebook are to keep in touch with current friends (67%) and family members (64%), or to reconnect with friends they've lost touch with (50%). Compare those numbers to the 2% of respondents who said they use social media to meet new friends and the 5% who said they log on to read comments from celebrities, politicians and athletes. Path launched with the provocative idea that in order to make the network more personal, users would only be allowed to have 50 friends at a time, a number inspired by the research of Oxford University professor Robin Dunbar that's since been expanded to 150. In How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar's Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks, Dunbar argues that people are better able to maintain personal relationships in groups of 150 people or less. Beyond that, the network needs more organization. Years ago when I joined MySpace, my social network was very much a community of similar-minded people my own age who lived nearby. I used the site to make weekend plans and to share pictures from parties. By the time I moved to Facebook, my circle had broadened to include co-workers and older relatives. I found that many of my friends were moving all over the world, getting new jobs, having babies, or just settling into such extreme political views that I had to stop posting about anything but the weather for fear that I'd accidentally expose one set of friends to the other. For that purpose Facebook categories (and Google + Circles) do a pretty good job of compartmentalizing friendships. For me, the closeness of the friend wasn't the issue, but where that friend fit into my life. I might want to talk about an upcoming reunion with classmates, but not with people who didn't go to my school; or to say Merry Christmas only to the people I know who celebrate it. When I set up my Path account, I thought I'd fill a real void in my network by getting my parents on there and a few other people that I see on a more regular basis. Unfortunately, Path is connected to enough social networks now that that this core group was too hard to contain. The minute I signed up, I could see which of my Facebook friends were already on Path and they could see me. I realized that it wasn't in my nature to decline a friend request from anyone I liked, no matter what my intentions for being on the site actually were. Thus my first friends on Path were not my husband or parents, but a couple of people I keep in touch with mostly through Facebook who live in other states. As far as I could tell, there was no way to turn this function off. I also realized that if I chose to syndicate any of my posts to Facebook or Twitter, others would see that I had been on Path and might feel inspired to join me. Related: New Twitter Rival: Does New Social Network 'Path' Give Us What Was Missing? It also worried me that on Path, my friends would be able to see when I'd accessed their pages. I'm an Internet lurker: I wander from page to page, observing others and commenting only when I have something important to say. This was a horrible feature of dating sites that, back in the day, I had immediately turned off once I found out about it. Even on Path I didn't especially want to know who was looking at my picture 17 times, or to have to explain to my sister that I wasn't being a weirdo, I was just passing my phone around to show my friends a picture of the family dog that she had posted on her page. In reality, the fact that the app was on my phone prevented obsessive page-checking. I was lucky if I had time for a couple of posts during my morning bus ride, much less multiple views of someone else's profile. And surprisingly enough, when one friend looked at my page after I had looked at hers, I felt acknowledged without feeling pressured to start a conversation. The Mobile Network As I walked around New York City, mobile phone in hand, I could see where Path was actually taking me: away from my desktop computer and into the real world. It's not that I don't use Facebook, Foursquare or Twitter on my phone - I do - but I had to admit that the user experience on Path was much nicer. The app's icon looks like the cover of a cloth-bound journal, which is a nice visual reminder of what Path is supposed to be for. (Although my husband pointed out that the white "P" on the red background makes it look a little bit like the Phillies' logo.) Once inside, a little plus sign in the bottom left corner led me to everything I'd need to do with the app: check in, post an update, mention a friend, add a song from iTunes, take a picture, and announce whether I was awake or asleep. Check-ins: During my first check-in, I was pleased to see that the app knew I was in the Murray Hill neighborhood in Manhattan. New York City, like most places, is full of neighborhoods that tell more about where the user is than the name of a restaurant or the city itself. I couldn't find all of the specific places I went to in the "search nearby" tool, but that is something that will improve with time. If I wanted to go into stealth mode for birthday gift shopping or other shenanigans, I could turn off the automatic posting so no one could see where I was. Updates, or Thoughts: The updates appeared like text message bubbles, which friends could weigh in on with emoticons as well as words. Most people opted for the smiley face, the heart, or the wink. Tone is one of the hardest things to convey on the Internet, so smiley faces and sympathy frowns are always welcome. Include friends in the post: The hardest part about this was that although I loved being able to easily add people from my phone contacts as well as my other networks, it brought to my attention that I need to organize my contacts a little better. It took me two whole days to realize that I was linking to my husband through his work number instead of his Facebook page or email address, which meant he hadn't received a notice to sign up for Path yet and the name that appeared in my posts was just a name. Add a song: The search bar was easy to use and had a lot of selections from the iTunes library, but only played a little snippet of the song, which was actually good enough for the purposes of posting on a social media site. Take a picture: I liked that I could access my camera straight from the app, which made it easier to check in somewhere, post a comment and take a picture all at once. I could also get to my photo gallery to find a picture for my wall background, which is a throw-back to MySpace that I liked. Go to sleep: This last one was odd. Clicking "go to sleep" put up a screensaver, which was helpful if I didn't want to be disturbed, but it did make me feel like a house cat in an endless cycle of napping and waking up throughout the day, while not sleeping at all during the night. All in all, using Path reminded me of switching from MySpace to Facebook. The first of my friends to try Facebook told me that the interface was a lot nicer because it had a plain, white background and only one font. At the time, MySpace allowed too much personalization with the wall backgrounds, which led to eyestrain and stalled browsers if the profile upgrades involved Flash. I just switched because my life was changing and I wanted my profile to look more grown-up. If I switched to Path for good, it would be for the enhancements to the mobile experience. Path may have started out as a way for people to cut back on their thousands of friends and get more personal, but what they've actually done is make a prettier application for people to use on their phones. And for those of us who'd like to get a little more fresh air while we catch up with our friends, that might be good enough.

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My First Adventure with Path 2.0 -- Is It Still a Personal Network?

Devon Glenn

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Devon Glenn