Path: what the fuck?
Path is an Instagram-like photo sharing app for the iPhone (and other platforms). It has a very different (read: strange, bizarre) social interaction model, and I’m flummoxed by it.
Social networks online have a few different models of network graphs. They can be reduced down, with little loss of accuracy, to the following:
- Asynchronous incoming (Twitter): I can follow you without you following me back. (Instagram also has this model.)
- Synchronous (Facebook): I can follow you iff you follow me back.
- Asynchronous outgoing (Path): I can follow you only if you explicitly add me. You follow me if I choose to push my updates to you.
(This list obviously ignores privacy settings and “hiding”. Twitter can be made to act more like Facebook by going “protected”, where someone follows you only if you approve of them. (But, you don’t have to follow them back to allow them to see your updates. This is a recent change; back in 2007-8, you did have to follow them). Facebook allows you to friend someone and then hide everything about them from the activity feed, so you’re connected in the social graph but remain free from that person’s updates.)
I’m a big fan of Twitter’s model. It allows for popularity without presenting the popular person with scale issues. I doubt you’ll ever find Kanye West or John Gruber on Facebook: they’d have to deal with hundreds of friend requests per second, and if they wanted to preserve their previous view of Facebook (with their pre-existing 100 friends), they would have to hide all those new users. This doesn’t scale.
Path’s model is far stranger than this. If I want to follow Bailey, I’m stuck hoping she chooses to push her updates to me. And I sure hope she likes seeing all my cat photos, because I’m pushing my updates to her, possibly against her will. She could choose to “pause” her updates, but she can’t make me completely disappear from her “friends sharing things with you” list.
The sharing cap is a separate and distinct issue from social graph oddities.
I follow a not-entirely-ridiculous 200 people on Twitter. Approximately 120 of those people post at least once a week, and maybe only 50 are active per day. Those idle folks are people I’m still friends with, and I want to see posts from them if/when they do visit the service again. I would hate to remove them just to open a slot up for someone who’s more active, because of an arbitrary limit set by the service. A 50 person limit is, as @timoni pointed out, rather nuts: it forces an incredibly burdensome “is this person worth it?” decision for every single friend you add on the service.
One of the things I love the most about Twitter and Instagram is the serendipity and exploration. I can follow people on Instagram that I know tangentially through other friends, and discover that they take incredibly interesting photos. I can mention someone on Twitter, and other people can see their posts and choose to follow them.
Path allows for none of this. Like Facebook, it seems aimed primarily at “you already know and trust these people”, and it feels clique-ish.
I love the app, but I hate their social graph model, and I’m trying to delete my account.
