Path Needs to make Web a Priority if it Wants to be Relevant

As many of you know, I’m a huge fan of privacy online and services that not only enable it, but make it an essential part of their business. Path is a service that allows people to create a mobile social network, with restrictions of having 150 friends maximum for each user.

Path’s raised some capital from some all star investors and is founded by Dave Morin, who is a Facebook and Apple alum, but the key work history is from Facebook since he was the 30th- or so employee there.

As far as some history for the company itself, their version 1.0 product was a non-catchy utter disaster even though the concept was awesome. Privatizing social interactions through any social networking service is a must if the company wants to expand the service and create a sustainable product, in my opinion. The largest problem with the first version was that people just didn’t catch on. Often times since the service is private, you don’t get the Twitter effect, where there are just random people that befriend you and the service just takes off like a rocket ship. Some examples would be YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, so on and so forth.

Path took another go at the product, released a new version and people seemed to catch on. This time they focused on expressing the service as a journal instead of a network. At the core, the product may be identical to the first version, however the product uplift gave users a reason to give it another go. This time people seem to be sticking to the product since Dave mentioned there’s at least a 30x more sharing rate than before, on this brutally honest and insightful interview with JCal from ThisWeekIn.

Now that I’ve layed out some of the backstory for you, I want to explain to you why Path needs to make web an equal focus to mobile.

With any social service, a product doesn’t work (private or public) if there is no social. Mobile is great, but people still spend time on computers all day long. Put these together and web is hole that Path should fix, very soon. If the service doesn’t pick up within families or friend circles beyond technologists, then it won’t be dethroning Facebook. If it does, it will dethrone Facebook. The only way I see Path being a stage 5 threat to Facebook is if Path does the web. Path has done mobile very beautifully, and there is no doubt they can execute the web just as great- and people will come if they do.

If you think about your Facebook stream today, don’t you hate seeing updates from people whom you barely know, or worse off, people you just added because you met them for five minutes once and they added you? Yes of course, which is why Facebook added the unsubscribe button. But the biggest problem is Facebook has botched its privacy functionality multiple times, even savvy technology minded geeks cannot figure it out half the time. I’m not taking a jab at Facebook, they’ve just grown very big and it’s too late to turn back and tell people the friend limit of 5000 is being reduced to 500 or even 150. You usually don’t try to make a 20 year old car compete with the latest models, instead just buy a new model and learn what it has to offer. If you think about it social networks are the same way, people will switch if there is a viable alternative that is better looking and offers more functionality. But the but here and it’s a huge but- is that Path needs to create the web because it will have to drive more than 1 or 2 people from everyones’ friend circles in order to create a movement around their service. Not everyone has a mobile device like an iPhone and many just don’t care to be using the device for other than work even if they do. Having a web destination for when people do want to be social addresses this.

The fact is people want privacy and limitations on who can see things they post online, and Path is great for it. Why did people give G+ a try? Ask your friends, if they still use it. I’ve heard many people complain that it was creepy because random people added them to circles, forcing them to delete their profiles. People want an alternative to Facebook and the way I see it, Path can really capitalize on this vulnerability right now.

I will end this post here, even though I could write a ton more on Path and the future with this: I believe Path can be worth billions of they build a web destination.