Path

» see path.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

path launched on 15 november 2010. it was made by dave morin (one of the early facebook product managers) plus dustin mierau and shawn fanning (the napster founder). the pitch was specific: a private social network for your closest friends. capped at 50 people. you could share photos, your location, who you were with, what you were listening to. but only with that small group.

the 50-cap was the whole product. dunbar's number (the famous anthropological estimate of how many real relationships humans can maintain) is around 150. path argued that 50 was the closer-friends subset of that. facebook and twitter let you have thousands of contacts. path said: that is too many. let us make a small thing.

the cap got raised to 150 in 2011. then to 500 in 2013. each raise reduced the original premise. the audience felt the intimacy slip away with each change. by 2014 path was no longer obviously different from any other social network. dave morin sold it to daum kakao (the korean company) in may 2015 for an undisclosed amount. daum kakao ran it for three more years before shutting it down on 18 october 2018.

i never used path. it was a US-focused product and the social network audience in turkey had already settled on facebook by 2010. i remember reading about path on tech blogs and seeing screenshots of its apparently very nice interface. the friend cap idea was interesting on paper. but the people i would have wanted to use it with were not on it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what made it different ~

path's interface was beautiful. the design language was clean, minimalist, with very thoughtful typography and animation. opening path felt different from opening facebook. the experience was deliberately calm. there was no infinite scroll. there were no ads in the early years. notifications were sparing.

the content was different too. on facebook you posted things for an audience of hundreds. you self-edited. on path you posted for an audience of 50. you could be more honest. you could share things you would not share on a bigger network. some people genuinely used path this way.

the location features were also unusually good for 2010-2012. when you arrived somewhere, path could automatically post that you had arrived. the implementation was careful. not creepy. small visual indicators. for friends who used path together, you always sort of knew where each other was. like find-my-friends but with more context.

~ the friend cap ~

the original 50-friend cap was the most-discussed feature of path. it forced a specific behavior. you could not just add everyone you knew. you had to actually pick 50 people. that picking was itself meaningful. it forced you to think about who your closest friends actually were.

the cap was also a real growth constraint. social networks grow through invitations. if your friends could only invite 50 other people each, the network grew slowly. facebook grew because everyone could invite everyone. path could not grow that way. by mid-2011 path had a few hundred thousand users when facebook had hundreds of millions.

path raised the cap to 150 in 2011. then to 500 in 2013. each raise was an attempt to grow faster. each one removed the small-network premise. by the time the cap was 500, path was just a social network with a slightly nicer interface. the original differentiation was gone.

~ the contacts incident ~

in february 2012 a developer named arun thampi noticed that path's iphone app was uploading the user's entire contact list to path's servers without asking. this was not unusual at the time. lots of apps did this. but path got caught at the right moment, when journalists were starting to write about mobile-app privacy.

the response was severe. apple announced new privacy controls. path apologized. dave morin promised to delete the data. the FTC investigated. path settled for 800,000 dollars. the broader privacy conversation that started with path eventually led to apple's permission system for contact access on ios.

the incident damaged path's brand precisely because path's brand was about being a careful, considered, friend-focused product. the contact upload felt like a betrayal of that promise. some users left. the recovery from the incident was slow.

~ the shutdown ~

path raised about 60 million dollars across several funding rounds. growth was always smaller than the funding implied. by 2014 the company was clearly struggling to compete. facebook had instagram. snapchat had launched in 2011 and was growing fast. path was a third-place niche product with a famously beautiful design that nobody could turn into a business.

in may 2015 dave morin sold path to daum kakao, the company that runs the dominant messenger in south korea (kakaotalk). the price was undisclosed. industry estimates were "small," probably under 100 million. daum kakao ran path as a separate brand for three more years.

on 18 september 2018 daum kakao announced path would shut down on 18 october 2018. users were given a month to download their data. the actual shutdown happened on schedule. the path.com domain redirects to daum's main korean page now.

~ what it taught us ~

the small-network thesis was right. the small-network business was not. path's argument that intimate networks are more honest was correct in user research terms. people did share more honestly with their close friends. they did appreciate the quieter interface. but they also did not generate the kind of usage and ad revenue that scales a social-media company.

the contact-upload incident matters. it was one of several events between 2012 and 2014 that pushed apple to tighten privacy controls on ios. the modern permission system on iphones (where each app has to ask before accessing contacts, photos, location) is partly a result of path getting caught.

the design was the legacy. path's UI was widely admired and openly copied. several features that ended up in instagram, snapchat, and even modern facebook trace back to path's specific implementation. the moments timeline. the soft animation when you switched views. the small typography choices. those design decisions diffused into the broader social-app design language.

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