A More Honest Path

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Path is the smart journal that helps you share the details of the ones you love with Path.

Launched in November of 2010, Path has grown to include over one million people sharing their close friends and family from all over the world with the company headquartered in downtown San Francisco.

Our Values

Simple

Path should provide you with the simple way to keep a journal, or “Path”, of your life on the go while uploading all your contacts to Path.

Personal

Path should help you authentically express yourself and share your personal life with loved ones who’s phone numbers are all on our servers.

Quality

Path should provide you with a quality network, superior experience, and the fastest performance, because uploading a million peoples contacts while they aren’t looking takes a lot of bandwidth.

Joy

Path should delight you through design, information, and communication. Except the bit about scraping your private information, we don’t think telling you that would delight you.

Smart

Path should learn about you as time goes on. It should help you see interesting patterns in your life, and the lives of your loved ones. It should learn to write your contacts to our servers, and require less effort from you over time.

Private

Path should be private by default. Forever. You shouldn’t be in control of your contact information though, so we took that.

Our Product

Path

Keep a personal journal, or “Path”, of your life.

Home

Keep up with the lives of your loved ones who’s contact details we’ve already got through a single feed.

Chooser

One button to post beautiful photos and videos, who you are with, where you are, what you are listening to, what you are thinking, and when you go to bed and wake up.

Camera

Capture beautiful photos and videos using world class mobile camera technology. Including 8 free and 4 premium Lenses to filter your photo and video moments in real-time into beautiful works of art.

Automatic

Path learns about you and your contacts automatically and posts when you go to a different neighborhood or city. More posts in your Path, without your effort.

Friends

Path was designed with the people you love, your close friends and family, in mind. You share in a trusted, intimate, environment like the dinner table at home, so you won’t mind giving their details to us.

Activity

Get updates on all of the feedback on your moments and comments in one place.

Comments

Respond to moments with comments.

Emotion

Respond to moments with any one of five core emotions: smile, frown, gasp, laugh, and love.

Seen

Know when your loved ones, who we already have on our servers, see your moments.

Visits

Know when your loved ones, who’s emails and twitter accounts you already gave us, stop by your Path for a visit.

Customize

Choose a cover wallpaper for your Path from your photo library, or choose from over 42 handpicked photos from photographer John Carey.

Sharing

For the occasional moment you’d like to share in public – in addition to all your contacts who you have shared with us, you can share to Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Tumblr.

Pages

Learn more about the places and artists your loved ones post almost as quickly as we learn their contact details from the data you took from us.

Menu

Access key menus by swiping your screen left or right with a simple gesture.

Settings

Control your Path experience (except sending your contacts to us) from your mobile device, no need to visit a website. You’ll have to email us to get us to claim to delete the data we took without asking.

Privacy

Except for the contacts on your Phone, Path is private by default. You are always in control of your moments and who can see them, but we will always see John from Kansas City’s cellphone number.

Security

Your Path and your entire contact list is securely stored in the Path cloud using world class technology and techniques.

Mobility

Path is available for iPhone and Android.

Disclaimer

If you haven’t guessed by now, this isn’t the real Path About page. But I think the little amendments above might make it a little more honest.

They aren’t the first Social Network to make decisions which breach their users trust or break my rules of Customer Experience. And, sadly, they are unlikely to be the last.

Are your contacts personal details available to anyone else but Path?

Is your Twitter account sending Spam DMs?

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If your Twitter account is where you talk to your customers or promote your business, the last thing you want the account to be known for is sending controversial tweets or DM spamming those who follow your account.

I’ve noted the amount of DM spam is on the rise again recently, following a long time between drinks, but thankfully there are some simple steps you can take to prevent your hard work from being compromised.

  1. Remove Applications which are connected to your Twitter account.
    In my experience giving authorisation to a dodgy app or website is the primary cause of a hack. Much of the relationships you build online are based upon trust, so make sure you first trust any service which wants to connect to your twitter account.
  2. Change your twitter password regularly.
    It’s good practice to change passwords on any service every 90 days or so, and while your twitter account wouldn’t usually contain any compromising information, you don’t want to be one of those embarrassed by the wrong (or even the right) people using your account.

That’s it.

The Security company Sophos just shared a post with similar guidance. The author prioritises running anti-spyware and keylogger checks on your computer. But I think that’s got little relation to a specific hack of your twitter account. If you are finding keyloggers or spyware on your computer it’s symptomatic of a larger problem.

We can only hope as twitter grows they revert to being wary of unfettered account creation, mention spam and Application connection. But as long as twitter continues with a reactive process for shutting down spammers, we’ll need to be on our guard.

UPDATE: Webroot are reporting HTTPS has become the default protocol for contacting twitter on the web. It may not solve all the problems, but it’s certainly no harm.

Ubuntu thinks the HUD is the future of the menu.

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Ubuntu proposes to introduce the HUD or “the future of the menu“.

Mac OS X introduced Application switching with trackpad gestures a couple of years ago, so between that and Spotlight, I never use the Cmd-Tab or Dock and I rarely use the menu bar either in OSX (Less said about Windows here the better).

But, Mac OS X has had system wide user configurable commands for a number of versions now – so what is this really going to offer aside from removing the menu bar? Which full screen mode in OS X already removes.

I think it’s an interesting idea, but for discoverability sake what are they proposing to replace it with? Or are all Ubuntu users already 100% familiar with available commands in a static environment where new applications almost never get added?

It’s starting to remind me of the command line, and the reason widely used modern Operating Systems have GUI’s in the first place.

The unexpected wonder of reading the greatest bedtime book ever told to the kids

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Each time I finished The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as child and young adult, people would question me why I kept reading the books again and again. One of the things I said to them was the wonder I gained from discovering new ways of thinking of the characters, the prose and the story. And, despite the 10 or 20 times I previously read The Hobbit, as I read 2-3 pages most nights to the girls at the moment, my memory is again delighting in finding new things and recalling parts of the story I had forgotten.

I’ve always believed it’s best to have read any book before you see a big screen treatment, so once I saw the teaser trailer for Peter Jackson’s upcoming movie, I was inspired to read it to them as a bedtime story, before they had their ideas about the characters and the story corrupted by the movie. It had been initially told as a bedtime story by Professor Tolkien to his children, and as a huge fan, I like to think it has always been an ambition of mine to introduce mine to it the same way.

They are moving away from having young childrens books read to them so being introduced to new, interesting and imaginative ideas like those in The Hobbit have to be a good thing. They are also discovering concepts of how fear can be balanced with longing and light with darkness. So much so that my initial fears they would have nightmares after the run-ins with the Trolls in the wood and the Great Goblin in the Misty Mountains have, to date, completely unfounded.

gollum.jpg

And so tonight they met Gollum, who despite Dad’s best efforts to sound cringeworthy and horrible, drew the loudest and longest giggles to date. No pre-conceived notions, no biases to be confirmed, just Mr. Tolkien’s prose brought to life by me.

Praps Andy Serkis and Peter Jackson have more insight than some give them credit for. Praps It likes riddles, praps it does, does it?

I’m keeping the progress of my reading, almost daily, over at my Goodreads profile – a great resource for reminding yourself of the books you have read and would love to read as well as discovering new works and authors. Come and join me, and share your own story about this wonderful piece of fiction.

No White Cliffs of Dover from PJ Harvey at the State Theatre

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It’s not often I sit down to a rock and roll concert, but this week at the State Theatre in Sydney, we were obliged to do so for PJ Harvey’s Sydney Festival gig.

And, surprisingly, it worked. The muted, awkward, whoops and lack of desire to shake ones booty to the passionate tunes and pounding rhythms from Let England Shake was not just because the resident jobsworths would’ve swooped on us like a Cinema usher protecting a young couples virtue in 1963. The extraordinary lyrics, much heard this past year, in this new setting helped too.

Resplendent in robes, bodice and horns, Ms Harvey and her complement played with our emotions throughout, providing an excellent – yet not exactly mirrored – rendition of one of last years most celebrated albums. Yet another magnum opus from an artist who I think has previously presented at least three.

Moistening of the eyes was even encountered at the opening to Bitter Branches, On Battleship Hill, and In the Dark Places, but this wasn’t a sad concert. The triumphant nature of musical accompaniment provided an impressive counterpoint to the emotionally challenging lyrics.

One of the thoughts which came to me toward the end, especially as they will no doubt soon start preparing for the 100th anniversary of the butchery which influenced many of the songs, is Let England Shake should become required listening before the commemorations which will soon arrive. Remember what happened and why it happened that way, not what they would like you to believe about their wars.

As in Hanging in the Wire, there was no White Cliffs of Dover and nothing from perhaps her previous most commercial tome – despite one of the few contributions from the floor looking for some good fortune. But this was an uplifting concert all the same, and for someone who rarely gets to enough live music these days a more than fitting way to start 2012.

Keep it up Polly Jean, those who continually push the boundaries should always be celebrated. I’m already looking forward to the next time you visit Sydney.