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Path — Introducing The Personal Network

blog.path.com

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Re: Path — Introducing The Personal Network

#81

Post by extension »

cabalamat wrote: post #69
shadowsun7 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your reference to the 'Real Life Social Network', and I'd also point out that keeping your groups separate is a hard problem to solve. To execute, you have to have something that's easy, simple to use, opaque when you want it to be (and vice versa), and you have to model the way your groups see each other (or can they? Should they?). I'm very interested to see who finally manages to find the solution to…

LiveJournal solved all these problems years ago (at least, I found it easy to use).

That worked because social computing was still on the fringe and its relatively small user base only intersected one of our social spheres. If our parents had had livejournals, we would have had this problem.

Re: Path — Introducing The Personal Network

#82

Post by protomyth »

peteforde wrote: post #10

Would anyone care about this if it wasn't launched by highly visible Facebook alums? Quality should be judged on merit, not who made them. If there's magic here, somebody lift the kimono.

"Would anyone care about this if it wasn't launched by highly visible Facebook alums?"

Reputation and association are forms of merit (or demerits) accumulated by people. For example, people often pre-order books based on the author.

Re: Path — Introducing The Personal Network

#83

Post by Timothee »

stuntgoat wrote: post #52
shadowsun7 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your reference to the 'Real Life Social Network', and I'd also point out that keeping your groups separate is a hard problem to solve. To execute, you have to have something that's easy, simple to use, opaque when you want it to be (and vice versa), and you have to model the way your groups see each other (or can they? Should they?). I'm very interested to see who finally manages to find the solution to…

What about a tab for each Path share group indicating which friends you share photos with? If you want to share photos with "work: medium-good friends" you can and insure that the "work: ok friends" or "family: mom's side" don't get the same post. I feel like the hard problem is not to keep groups separate, but to re-factor existing infrastructure to support separation and making it 'easy' for users.

I feel the hardest part is making it easy for users. Facebook has offered lists and groups for a long time, and it's fairly easy to post something to just a specific list. However, I found that the difficult part is the housekeeping of these different groups.

Even if you take the time to create lists for your different social groups, these groups will evolve over time, because of new friendships, fights or whatever; which means that you need to spend time maintaining who belongs to what group. That will generally not happen.

The other solution is to rely on intelligent systems that manage your groups (Facebook could do that kind of things based on who interacts with whom, and what kind of subjects, etc.) or who sees what (Facebook already kind of does that from the point of view of showing you what you will find interesting, not what other can or not see at all) but relying completely on systems like that is difficult and scary, and will still hinder sharing stuff blindly.

Re: Path — Introducing The Personal Network

#86

Post by ImperatorLunae »

Here's what will kill this:

When a social network starts, its membership is sparse. Not everyone uses it, and the odds that your best friends will all pick up and use it off the bat are improbable. Therefore, in the lonely wasteland of a newly colonized social network, people tend to make friends with acquaintances. Of course, you're not super good friends with these people, but it would be rude to deny their requests as well.

What do you do when your real friends finally show up? Frump your acquaintances? Sure, you weren't really good friends with these people, but you don't want to isolate yourself from them either. Frumping/defriending/depathing actively demonstrates to them that the budding friendship you could have had is not there. People in real life move on, but they also get back in touch too. Having to squeeze back into someone's "path" is unnatural. Sure, it happens in real life, but to have to actively mimic that on a website--what if you are overestimating the value another person sees in you? That could have disastrous consequences. I don't maintain 500+ friendships at once, but I wouldn't want to tell 500 people "sorry, we're not friendly enough to be pathed."

Path really seems to have a flawed premise. Considering the hype, they've probably got quite a big chunk of funding too. I see it degenerating into a popularity contest--social groups have an ebb and flow, but they rarely have official declarations. What happens when people wander apart? Do you declare, "our friendship is not important enough to be in my path anymore?" I could never imagine doing that to anyone. What if you have forty relatives you'd like to keep in touch with? Can you only have ten friends?

Re: Path — Introducing The Personal Network

#87

Post by qcassidy »

CERTIORARI wrote: post #77
jamiequint wrote: post #30

The production quality here is really really good. However, I agree with the excellent presentation posted here a while ago 'The Real Life Social Network' ( http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ... ) that the issue isn't number of people I want to share with. The issue is that the groups of people I want to share content with are completely separate. There are a number of pictures I would be ha…

Email solved this problem 20 years ago.

No, it didn't. If you're sharing pictures via email, you're doing it wrong.

Re: Path — Introducing The Personal Network

#88

Post by dotBen »

bl4k wrote: post #64
dotBen wrote: post #45

Overall I like the concept, but my main gripe is that if you don't have an iPhone the web-based service is useless. I can't add any friends even if I know their url - I can only hope they add me. I'd have thought letting people add friends by visiting their url on the website would be a reasonable feature of even the most basic MVP iteration. As it stands the web site is useless to non-iPhone users and so I don't see…

I agree. I couldn't work out how to add people - no import from Google or Facebook or whatever. While I do believe in release early, these guys may have blown it only because of how much attention they have (or had).

So after making my comment, I went and wrote this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1907504

Re: Path — Introducing The Personal Network

#89

Post by austinchang »

ScottBurson wrote: post #8

Looks interesting. I'm not a social-network user -- I closed my Facebook account a couple of months ago, and I've never used Twitter -- but this I could see using. That could be the bad news: the site might appeal most to those like me who value our privacy -- and I'm not sure how many of us are left :) But I'm not an iPhone user either. Currently using a Pre but contemplating a switch to Android.

The idea of a personal network is a good one but the problem is that there isn't just 1 personal network but clusters of networks. how do you address the different type of interaction in a limited network of only 50?

Re: Path — Introducing The Personal Network

#90

Post by austinchang »

jamiequint wrote: post #30

The production quality here is really really good. However, I agree with the excellent presentation posted here a while ago 'The Real Life Social Network' ( http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ... ) that the issue isn't number of people I want to share with. The issue is that the groups of people I want to share content with are completely separate. There are a number of pictures I would be ha…

Yeah… we completely agree. The idea of a "personal network" is definitely right but the real problem is that not everyone fits the same mold of "friends". much less a subset of 50 people? do you give your cousin the cliff over your coworker of 5 years for that 50th spot?

The notion of "clustered social graphs" where you can share and update what you want/when you want and ignore/archive/or leave when you are done is more accurate on how people interact.

The Frid.ge has been contemplating how this maps out as a mobile experience and sharing what you want when you want with who you want. How is that limited to just a one group of people all the time?

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