Are the guys over at Path and Facebook playing with the same roadmap? Was there a meal somewhere between Mark Zuckerberg and Dave Morin where they agreed to build the exact same product, but just at different scales?
Facebook’s big three features are Newsfeed, Timeline and Search.
November 29, 2011 - Path introduces v2, centered around a Timeline and Newsfeed with a hero image
December 22, 2011 - Facebook introduces Timeline, essentially a dynamic profile history with a hero image, after 3 months of rollout
December 20, 2012 - Path introduces search: primarily moments where your history intersects with your contacts
January 15, 2013 - Facebook introduces search: a wider net that is geared towards activities of your 1st and 2nd degree contacts
Liking Path’s new iPad app - and props to launching it even if all the edge cases for the grid-landscape layout hasn’t been worked out. The math behind the grid/aspect ratios are all sorts of crazy, I can only imagine. The design details are stellar per usual.
Not sure if this will increase my activity much as the network size and pace of updates makes the experience perfect for the phone ( altho I admit that Path is my go to network for updates at the moment). Landscape view is great for consumption but the portrait view seems like a noisier version of the app on the phone — don’t really think you need the ever present navigation even if the real estate is available.
hithertodotnet:
So, Path fucked up then. If you haven’t heard, it turns out they were hoovering all the email addresses out of your phone’s address book, and using them to notify you when new friends signed up for the service.
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The other obvious slightly-creepy “feature” in the app right now is the notifications, helpfully posted without your intervention, when you significantly change location. They consist of an airplane icon, the news that you “arrived in City”, together with the date and time. But people have legitimate reasons for not wanting everyone to know where they went — what if you’ve flown somewhere over a long weekend for a job interview, for example? It’s the kind of thing that seems “great, fun, adding depth to the product” on a whiteboard, but can be Seriously Creepy in real life.
If anything, Path 2.0 didn’t double down on their model of a network for close friends and family (how many people have 140 close friends and family?). That aside, today was a much ado about nothing.
And I don’t mind sharing my location (neighborhood is a pretty common place that you share versus an address) automatically with my close friends and family — which is why I love Path so much. There’s such a clear lack of noise and a lot of signal because from the very beginning, I’ve limited my network to the people where I would share info that I would not on Facebook or Twitter.
After playing with Path for about 20 minutes total this morning - the only quibbles I have are 1) there’s no forgot password flow and 2) the like/social signal area has the same container as comments - makes for a jolting (and sad) field when there’s only one emoticon.
Really, that’s all I got. Kind of drawn to the design choices from the Path team today.
Holy heck the Path new app is not only stunning to use and look at, but I’m so in awe of the “easy” features. This is what execution looks like. Amazing. Did I also mention game-changing?
High-res
