I'm sorry to be a naysayer, but I don't see why anyone even cares about Path. It seems to me to be another me too social sharing app that doesn't really provide much value. I am on the 37 signals bandwagon right now -- build a valuable product and charge money for it. This talk about building a slow company sounds to me like marketing bs from people with too much funding and not enough product.
Clarification: It wasn't anticipated by anyone other than the tech startup community insiders.
Two types of hype seem to exist in this industry -- hype generated from an awesome new product/service, or hype generated because some already successful people threw money at it. This happens to be the latter.
If some big names weren't attached, no one would be talking about it at all because the basic gist (at least so far) is, "It's like Twitter for photos but less powerful".
Oh, I know it was sarcasm... I'm just pissed off at Path for some reason and wanted to comment how the tech insiders sometimes make up their own hype -- as if their own excitement speaks for the rest of the world that doesn't give a shit.
It is true that we all live in a bubble, and that people with past success get a disproportionate about of attention for their future products (I sure have!).
That being said, in ever other industry (music, film, etc) this seems to happen as well.
I love the fact that folks are excited about the LAUNCH conference because of my work on Silicon Alley Reporter, Engadget and because i created TechCrunch50.
Keep in mind it is also a slight burden, in that folks expect your projects to boom overnight--and that's not how 99% of launches go.
folks ripped Mahalo.com apart at the start, and it's only since we hit the top 200 sites and 20M+ video views a month that we've started to get a little credit.
People who failed before have the same amount of success as people who have never tried at all.* Success is the experience that actually counts."
The good thing for these guys is that they've succeeded before. I don't think they will with this, but with enough connections, money, and reputation, who knows?
I would venture to say that photo sharing apps are the PREVIOUS geolocation apps.
While they may be new as phone apps (as opposed to web apps), people have been sharing photos in a million different locations and ways for years (Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Snapfish, OFoto, MobileMe, Picasa, Email...).
As it stands right now, I can't see Path solving any problem for me that isn't more easily solved by any number of already existing and wildly more pervasive tools.
