Path — Introducing The Personal Network

No following, no friending…just sharing with the people who matter most.

Path is a new app for iPhone that sets of on a very different approach to social networking. It’s goal is to be a highly focused “personal network” that allows you to share and tag personal moments using photos with no more than your fifty closest friends. Why no more than fifty?:

We chose 50 based on the research of Oxford Professor of Evolutionary Psychology Robin Dunbar, who has long suggested that 150 is the maximum number of social relationships that the human brain can sustain at any given time. Dunbar’s research also shows that personal relationships tend to expand in factors of roughly 3. So while we may have 5 people whom we consider to be our closest friends, and 20 whom we maintain regular contact with, 50 is roughly the outer boundary of our personal networks. These are the people we trust, whom we are building trust with, and whom we consider to be the most important and valued people in our lives.

There are many things I love about this app. Mainly, I love it’s sane, well thought out, and research based constraints. I love the fact that it calls these updates “moments”. I love that it does not allow you to choose existing photos or edit them before posting. It really does force one to share what is happening right then and there. Letting these moments speak for themselves with only enough details to provide context.

But most of all, I love that the people who I share with there are getting an honest peek into a story that I would only tell to those I trust most.