Path: A Cool New Social App or Just More of the Same?

By: Elisa Pequini | @lipequini A social network built to make sharing with people who are truly important to you easier. That's the idea behind Path. Self-described as "the smart journal that helps you share life with the ones you love," Path launched version 2.0 in November 2011, and the app only recently started to gain popularity.

Path limits your number of connections to 150 so you have to be as selective as possible about who you are sharing pictures, videos and location with.  We could say it's like a very private Facebook.

Oddly enough, the app integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Tumblr. Even though the whole point of the app is to be more personal than all of those other networks, Path still allows you to share what you want with your broader circles of friends, followers and connections. It makes sense: maybe you don't want to share everything with your Facebook friends, but if there's something you want to share, it would be a lot of work to log into both networks to do it, right? So Path let's you keep your "everybody" network while keeping your personal one, well, personal. The app even uses the information from your other networks to tell you who would be most likely to share information with and hint on who you should be adding to your Path network.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvpjq8KzLuw[/youtube]

As much as I like Path's principle of being a personal network, I am not sure it will catch on. For the same reason Facebook lists and Google+ circles haven't really taken off yet: because people don't have time (or patience) to choose who they want to share what with. They just want to share it. And if it's with everybody, so be it. They can tag people to make sure the right ones see it, so why bother with making lists or downloading another app?

But that's just my opinion. What are your thoughts on Path?