The tech blogs seem aghast that Path would dare to put out a product without standard social features.  What they are missing is that Path is an app built for the mass market and not for tech early adopters.  They omitted these features because normal people don’t need them.

Normal people do not have hundreds of friends that they want to share things with.  According to Dr Marlow, the “in-house sociologist” at Facebook, the average number of Facebook friends is 120 and the average number of people that one user actively interacts with on the service is between 7 and 10.   I think this correlates very closely with the real world.  At any given time you only have close relationships with 7-10 people.   Dave McClure wrote an excellent post on the need for intimacy in social networks and Path is a great example of how it can be done.

I want to break down three important pieces of Path’s product strategy for appealing to the mass market by keeping things small and intimate.

On Path, users can’t search through their Gmail/Facebook contacts for existing friends:

On most social apps, the service will check a user’s Facebook and Gmail contacts to see if any of their existing friends already use the service.

The problem is that Gmail and Facebook are filled with contacts that you are not close with.   As a social app becomes more popular, there is an increase in the number of inbound friend requests from people that fall outside of a users inner social circle. There is considerable social pressure to accept these friend requests, even if doing so ruins the intimacy of the network.  Path gets around this issue by removing this type of search capability.

On Path, you can only have 50 friends:

Path could let users have as many friends as they want, and let them decide how intimate or open they want their experience to be.   However, the normal mass-market user is not yet equipped for this type of calculated approach to friending.  They have not thought about their social graph like those in the tech industry have, segmenting it in multiple ways and assigning various groups to appropriate levels of online sharing.  That’s a concept that we have been working over for the last 2 years, and is a mental construct that is mostly foreign to them, at least in the online sense.

Normal users will not carefully preen their friend list. Instead, they will accept everyone they feel socially obligated to accept, and the service will ceases to feel intimate.  The 50-person limit makes each additional friend mean something.   This constraint gives it value, and makes the user think for a moment before adding someone new.  It gently leads the user to the understanding that not every person you know should be your ‘friend’ on every service.

On Path, users can’t share photos on Twitter and Facebook:

Of all the social media fallacies this is the biggest one.  Normal people do not NEED the ability share things from one app to Twitter and Facebook. It does not address a real pain point.  The feature is added because it’s a good marketing channel for the company, and not because it provides a better user experience.

Great software puts user experience first, and the proliferation of Share This buttons isn’t part of a good user experience.  They are confusing, error prone, and they clutter up the UI with something that is usually unrelated to the purpose of the app.

When I bring this up I’m always told , “you can’t possibly scale a user base without viral components like this”.  That’s sort of true.

When an app achieves quick adoption numbers, those users are all tech early adopters.  They are people who track this industry for fun and jump on a new hot service to test it out. There is little evidence that capturing that group will translate into mainstream adoption.  I would be willing to say that because an app is designed to appeal to tech adopters, it won’t achieve mainstream adoption.

Why?  Why can’t we just add the features the tech crowd expects and let the mass market ignore them?  That’s not the way the mass market works and that’s not how you build great software. When a normal user sees something they don’t understand they stay away from it.  They don’t just use parts of a service, they use the entire thing because it makes sense, or they back off because something is confusing and it scares them off.  They don’t first understand a service and then figure out how to hack it to make it work for them.  They use it for the base case or not at all.

Path has recognized this and built a product that will make the mass market feel at home, even if it means taking a little longer to build an audience.  I give a lot of credit to Dave Morin and his team.

“Web 2.0 – Interactive media theory where an infrastructure focusing on content creation, management, and dissemination is built for the user to generate that content in a community framework.”

I think we have taken that theory and successfully put it into practice.   In a few rare cases we even accomplished this with normal people, a feat that was all but impossible during the first bubble.  It’s a major step forward. The Angel Investors and Venture Capitalists that funded this research over the last few years deserve to be recognized.  They took a big gamble, and their efforts have helped to move an industry forward that will define our era.

The Early-Stage industry may need to tell their limited partners that they were making investments in businesses, but anyone in the Social-Media industry knows the truth.  We didn’t create businesses, we created experiments.

In October VCs sent letters to their portfolio companies telling them that now is the time to cut costs because raising money will be difficult.  The subtext to this is that now is the time to start generating revenue because the safety net is gone.  Shouldn’t they have invested in companies that were doing this from the start?  Maybe not.  Maybe the early stage industry is wise to invest in innovation,  but lets call a spade a spade.  The truth is that now is the time to generate a little revenue to subsidize the funding of innovation until the economy picks up.

It’s possible that the early-stage industry has had enough of funding innovation.  Maybe now really is the time to stop messing around with experiments and to create real businesses online.  We have spent 3 years thinking about innovative ways to engage people, and then figuring out how to monetize that later.  We can thank Google for the strategy.  It may be the best way to radically innovate.  It may even be a great strategy to make money when everyone else believes that a site with engaged users is valuable.  Whatever the motive, funding innovation is a noble pursuit and we really do owe them a debt of gratitude.  However, now may be the time to flip that strategy around; determine what people will pay for, and then figure out how to get people engaged.

Thinking this way will probably not result in radically innovative social media applications.  We will have businesses that aren’t as sexy, not as fun, and probably won’t classify as social applications.  They will be boring, revenue generating businesses.  It’s not play anymore, it’s the real thing, but the real thing makes money.

If we get serious, and start building businesses for revenue instead of for innovation and community, what happens to the Web 2.0 social applications?  Should we abandon them as a flight of fancy of an opulent time?

I think we just need a shift in perspective about what they are. A great social application is more like a movie than a business; it’s a piece of interactive entertainment.  A movie can be monetized, which makes it valuable to create, but nobody thinks of a single movie as a businesses.  The movie industry is run by people who make many movies and then monetize those assets.  In that sense the internet is already very much like the movie industry, only our studios are Google and VC Funds.

We should keep creating social applications because they expand our ability to express and open up new possibilities for information transfer.  Social applications that can generate money to justify the investment of the patrons of innovation are even better.  But let’s all stop pretending.  We are creatives innovating around a radically new medium.   It’s not some mystery why we haven’t turned these into businesses.  The truth is that they were never businesses to begin with.