Nine months and twenty-eight “moments” — that’s the tag line accompanying my headshot over a crisp, nature-themed default background image.
Welcome to Path, the mobile-only platform which seems to have successfully pivoted from a location-based photo sharing app to what I think could become a serious alternative to Facebook. The catch is that you’re limited to the Dunbar-inspired limit of 150 friends.
This is no all-purpose social platform. Path lacks a web interface, tablet app, public profiles, and the friend-categorization features now common to g+ and Facebook. It’s basically a timeline of check-ins, updates, and media which encourages tagging of others. This to me seems to suggest a highly focused and potentially valuable set of social data, which doubtless is part of the monetization strategy and otherwise remains a mystery.
This week I’ll be on vacation in the Florida Keys, then off to a wedding before flying back to NYC after the new year. I’m going to try an experiment in using Path as my primary check-in and photo sharing tool and pushing updates to my other profiles. Let’s see how it works out.
