“Did the experiment fail?” asks Morin in an interview with BuzzFeed News. “Maybe.”
Flickr: Joi Ito / Via Flickr: joi
When Path debuted in 2010, founder Dave Morin championed the app as an intimate social network created specifically to share photos and updates with a closed and trusted network of friends. At its launch, Path capped the number of friends a user can have at 50, based on popular anthropological research that suggested humans can only maintain a maximum 150 stable relationships. It didn't last long.
Four years later, the company has changed gradually but considerably. In 2012 Path upped the user limit to 150, and has since rolled out several iterations of the original Path product, including additional external apps like an ephemeral messaging service. Its devoted core of users in the United States are increasingly overshadowed by a booming following in Indonesia. Now Morin, still its CEO, and Path are planning on developing a new suite of apps that focus less on the prospect of an intimate, personal network and more on competing with the large social networks to which it once offered an alternative.
"Did the experiment fail? Maybe," he told BuzzFeed News. "Are we trying to take new approaches to the interface and approach it different ways than we did before? Absolutely. I think that's the big challenge. Trying to match human relationships and human behavior into software, [the] interface is very nuanced [and it's a] very iterative process. It's kind of a conversation with your users, some things work some things really don't. I think we've had it go both ways. I think failure is a big part of life and being human the best thing we can do is keep moving forward."
Morin said the company continues to be committed to preserving the personal, trusted nature of the original vision (something he calls "Path classic"). But today, even though the company continues to tout the intimacy of Path's closed network, which Morin said sees 4 million users per day, and promotes both the app and individual user profiles with the hashtag #thepersonalnetwork, users can now have up to 500 friends (which Morin now believes is the maximum spring of relationships a human can handle according to Dunbar's theory). It's a far cry from the private network Path described upon its launch. In short, Morin's personal network has gotten progressively less personal with every app update.
However, Morin said that widening Path's network hasn't led to a drop in numbers of users in the United States, where the app has a devoted core of users but hasn't quite broken through to the mainstream audience dominated by Facebook, where Morin was an early employee.
And for some of the app's devoted users, Path's decision to be more inclusive has proven frustrating, especially a new feature that encourages users to promote their Path profiles via Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram. Approximately 18 months ago, (per users requests, Morin notes) Path rolled out the feature which effectively kicks down the door of Path's closed network. A quick search of #thepersonalnetwork on Twitter turns up a slew of tweets that are some variation of the following.
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