Path is a well-enough designed product that I'm certain somewhere along the line someone had to have said, "Well let's automatically select all of their contacts and let them deselect if they don't want them," and then someone else said "let's just keep the 'deselect all' button" the same color as the bar behind it." I'm pretty sure someone on the Path marketing team was OK with the idea that they were going to trick you into inviting all of your contacts.
Yet Path claims to be a social network for close friends and family. If they were really concerned about the overall value of the product and not numbers, shouldn't it be offering up ways to choose the closest people to you instead of hoping you accidentally spam all of your friends? They'll get away with it, but it's a very, very short-sighted move.
I believe they were hoping you would accidentally message every one of your contacts, and actions such as these warrant uninstall by those who have already downloaded the app and refusal to download by those who haven't.
Yet Path claims to be a social network for its close friends and family. Shouldn't it be offering up ways to choose the closest people to you instead of hoping you accidentally spam all of your friends?
Path originally forced you to a friend limit of 100. Needless to say that makes exponential growth more difficult, so the limit was removed and marketing strategies were...changed.
Every subtlety in Path's product is a conscious decision. Of course they intended you to accidentally message all of your contacts - but in this post I was trying to shed light on the the real victims of the spam: other app developers
It’s my hope that under these conditions, apps that are genuinely growing will rise to the top, and those attempting to engineering their own virality will dissipate into irrelevance.
Unfortunately, when the current paradigm is to create and flip startups in the short-term, it's almost encourage to get rapid growth, long-term health be damned.
There are thousands of new apps on the market on a daily basis, all of them overlapping with each other and apps that are already on the market to a greater or lesser degree. Who is going to reduce that flood to the "best" of a particular category, worthy of your time and money, and on a regular and timely basis?
Granted, current app stores could be better, but you'd still have the discoverability problem simply due to the volume of apps now on the market.
Gaming is a tricky example, with gaming being a hit driven business: hits only last in the short term.
I don't believe Zynga was mislead by a viral product in Draw Something. They saw a fascinatingly simple game built by a great team, and I hope that's what they intended on purchasing, instead of yesterday's hit.
Yet Path claims to be a social network for close friends and family. If they were really concerned about the overall value of the product and not numbers, shouldn't it be offering up ways to choose the closest people to you instead of hoping you accidentally spam all of your friends? They'll get away with it, but it's a very, very short-sighted move.
I believe they were hoping you would accidentally message every one of your contacts, and actions such as these warrant uninstall by those who have already downloaded the app and refusal to download by those who haven't.