The New York Times has an interesting article today looking at the launch of Path, a new social network founded by ex-Facebook employee Dave Morin, who describes it as a “personal network”.
The twist is Path lets you have a maximum of 50 friends, which means, theoretically, you are limited to having real friends within your network as opposed to friends of friends of friends, acquaintances and people you don’t know. At first blush, Path is definitely different. The question is whether 50 or fewer friends will have any kind of appeal in a world in which collecting friends seems paramount. As well, can Path establish a foothold in an already crowded market. (See my recent “New Kid on the Block” post about the challenges facing newcomers taking on giants.)
Another important question is whether Path is a novelty or whether the social network pendulum is starting to swing back after an enthusiastic couple of years that has seen Facebook explode. With Path and other social networks such as Diaspora, there appears to be a move towards smaller, more private networks that, frankly, operate more like real-world networks.
While Path is focused on small, Diaspora is focused on privacy. Both seem to be a direct backlash to Facebook, which is focused on large social graphs and making as much of your information public despite its ever-changing privacy control adjustments.
Personally, I have been waiting for the social pendulum to start swinging back, although to what extent is unclear.
Right now, it feels like a wild party in which anything goes. Everyone is building large social networks based more on numbers than people we know or value. We’re sharing astounding and alarming amounts of information about our personal and professional lives with little sense of the potential consequences, including the fact many people are surrendering any kind of privacy. And we’re engrossed within our digital worlds while other parts of our lives such as fitness and friends get less time and attention.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m as much a digital animal as the next guy or girl. But there doesn’t seem to be a healthy balance between digital and non-digital. The Internet has come so far, so fast in the past decade, we have hardly had time to breath. At some point, I think people are going to run out of breath, look around, and wonder “How the hell did I get here?”
One way to look at start-ups such as Path is to consider them telltale signs or clues of what may be over the horizon for people looking for a new and different experience with the Web. For that matter, you could throw in the growing number of start-ups looking to wrestle e-mail to the ground given the amount of time we spend in our inboxes. And then there is the whole content curation movement.
All of these developments point to the fact people are starting to think the Web is out of control, and controlling too much of our lives and time.
