Just over 11 months ago, I downloaded Path — a rather nice app for sharing events and photos. I had a play around and, if memory serves, used it a few times and then moved on.
Fast forward to today and all of a sudden I am receiving tons and tons of invitations to use it. It seems the zeitgeist has caught up — so I’ve taken another look and, goodness me, version 2 is rather cool.
It’s a mix between Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. The developers have clearly thought very carefully about what they want from a sharing experience and delivered it. The user interface is a delight — an utter delight. They’ve cut down on clutter and got everything out of the way. I’m particularly intrigued by the ‘awake’ and ‘asleep’ functions (you can announce to your followers when you’ve gone to sleep, or when you’ve woken up — this also serves to avoid pinging you with updates whilst you’re resting). I haven’t quite remembered to properly activate this function yet but I’ve been noticing a few people I’m following really using it.
You can, of course, opt to have your updates sent to the usual suspects such as Twitter and Facebook as well. Combined with the new Facebook Timeline, Path integrates beautifully. It makes everything look lovely.
The experience is clearly in tune with Apple. If anything, Path could even be an Apple product. Here’s an email reminder I received from them today:
Even the emails are gorgeous.
The company’s website is pretty startling too. The whole site is a video! Check it out at www.path.com — very innovative.
The iPhone is one of the WORST possible handsets to use for real time communications because it’s such a SHITE, SHITE experience (for me, anyway) waiting for apps to have to boot up all the time. [I really, really enjoy BlackBerry’s persistent background and multitasking capabilities — Android too.] That said, Path delivers probably about the best messaging and sharing functionality on the iOS platform that I’ve seen.
A number of my friends have already adopted Path as their only mobile/social sharing facility. They’ve dumped everything else. I could see myself doing similar.
Here’s the introductory video:
Path – Introducing Path 2 from Path on Vimeo.
What do you think? Have you had a look yet?