Lately I’ve been mulling over a nasty, dark thought about this whole Path fiasco. I’ll share this with you in just a moment, but first we should take a glance back over the last year — as captured by various parts of the tech blogging press community;
But it should have been pretty clear from the get-go that their trajectories would be far different. Path was a service that went out of its way to dampen the viral effects that bring in massive amounts of users.
They were trying to do something different. Perhaps stubbornly so.
MG Siegler (Nov 2011)
…Path limits your connections to just 150 of your closest friends — people who wouldn’t make snap judgements about you. The result, says Morin, is a less edited version of your digital self, and a more authentic experience with your closest friends and family members.
“Our goal is to create an experience that’s trustworthy, warm and loving,” Morin says.
Mike Isaac (Nov 2011)
So what is Path? In short, it’s a private photo sharing network — think Instagram, but without the filters and with a privacy model that takes away any anxiety associated with sharing photos with people you don’t know. It’s based around email addresses and phone numbers, rather than a public database of users.
Jason Kincaid (Nov 2011)
So what’s my niggling dark little thought? It revolves around two small things.
#1 Trust
Firstly I’m honestly surprised by the sheer hypocrisy that’s been brought into light by the revelation that Path had been securely sending, then saving indefinitely, the contents of a users’ address book without even asking for permission to do so. I can’t emphasise just how much airtime on the app has been given over to trust and privacy.
A user should always trust the network, let’s do away with anxiety over judgement, let’s make the most personal app experience… and on it goes. The Path ‘About us’ page even goes so far as to say;
Path should be private by default. Forever. You should always be in control of your information and experience.
In control? The nerve.
#2 Freemium
There are some pretty serious implications of the Path freemium business model. MG Siegler posed this question over a year ago when Path v1 was initially released;
This concept also sort of reminds me of the private Twitter account idea. It definitely appeals to some. But does that scale? And what on Earth is the business model behind that? I have to assume paid accounts, but Path is currently free.
We’ve seen this model before. This time, Path has been silently collecting private user data from their users for over a year, without permission and without acknowledgement, via a freemium app that has no perceivable short term business model for financial growth, and with a company founder coming from a company well known for leveraging user data for ad-based revenue.
Now, perhaps it’s unfair to imply that Path had the intention of using this private address book data as a key component in a future revenue stream — and from all accounts the issue was an innocent act with no malevolence — but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to question the gap between perception and reality.
When the focus of an app is all about trust, personal experience, control over data — you’d better make sure you don’t break that trust.
Furthermore, why choose the freemium model over normal business model, you know, one where you make something and people pay you for it? It puts you in a very weird position where your end users are not your customers, and that can’t be a good result for either of you.
If you truly want to connect, to build personal relationships, to establish trust — what better way than to deliver a great service for a reasonable fee? One where I have no qualms about what you’ll do with my data, or where I feel like a commodity in your revenue stream.
“Our goal is to create an experience that’s trustworthy, warm and loving,” Morin says.
Sure you do.
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