I tried to use Path with my group of Smartphone Buddies this past Holiday season. I really did. We are all on Facebook and some of us even tweet every once in a blue moon, so I thought that using Path would be an interesting experiment.
The Path is a micro social networking that’s so cool it makes you want to load it up, just to play with it. There are awesome little animations for the menus, great default wallpapers, and very simple dialogue boxes to make sharing very, very easy. There are even options to auto-record your travels to new cities and neighbourhoods, so that you’re still recording even when you’re too busy to do so (“Oh, you were in The Village? Did you go to that great Vietnamese place?”).
I had dreams of us sharing warm, techno-chocolate sluices with one another as we shared pictures, checked into cool cafés, and generally Lived in the Future. The reality, however, has been a little different.
My friends are all pretty gung ho on services like Google Talk, Facebook, and Reddit, but I’ve had a hell of a time convincing them why they should *also* use Path alongside all of those other services. I’ve even tried to point out that you can post straight to Facebook and Twitter from Path, but that has made little difference. I’ve got a measly four or five friends on Path, and I occupy a depressing 80% of the recent timeline. There are only so many times I can read about how I’ve clipped my toenails (and I’m running out of toenails to clip).
This isn’t a problem with services like Facebook and Twitter where there are multiple angles, and more things to look forward to. Facebook has jungles of personal photos to stalk through, all sorts of old friends to re-connect with, and even games to play (though I never touch them). Twitter is integrated into all sorts of apps, easily displays all sorts of media in-line, and connects you to all sorts of people you’d love to meet, but likely never will (Hi, Nathan Fillion!).
It’s as if I’ve approached Path as a social network from the completely wrong direction. Instead of being pulled in by a community of old friends (Facebook) or glittering celebrities (Twitter), it has actually been Path’s Red Riding Hood flavouried UI that has enchanted me. Unfortunately, the community I’ve tried to form around it just isn’t vibrant enough, and it’s incredibly lame to ask your friends to “please, update moar”.
So it’s with red regret that I’m walking away from Path for now. It’s a truly lovely service and may work beautifully for others, but I don’t need it as a journal, and it just hasn’t panned out as an intimate social network. I’ll accept that I may have been “doing it wrong” and should have added more pals to Path, but I also think that these services should work without having to think too much about them. It could also be that my circle just isn’t cut out for this level of sharing, but whatever the problem is, I know I’m done. It was good fun, but it’s starting to feel strangely like talking to myself in a very pretty room.
It wasn’t a waste of time, though. It’s been interesting to see what kind of things I like to share (check-ins are neat, but unnecessary). It also seems like there’s a threshold for sharing amongst my circles, and although I don’t have that down to an exact number, I now better appreciate the power behind large communities like Facebook and Twitter, where the audience numbers in the hundreds, and not the tens. It turns out that there’s a lot more to this social networking business than a great UI and two-tap sharing.
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TAGS: social network, Social Networking App, Social Networks
