After social networks, now comes a personal network called Path
By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 16 November 2010, 22:30 IST
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San Francisco: Social networks have changed the way we live and our lifestyles nowadays revolve a lot around them. We are constantly updating our statuses, uploading pictures, changing our relationship statuses in these networks. Among all these things, the highlight of the social networks is they allow us connect to a great number of people we would otherwise have. However, there is now a change in the trend. Path, a new service started by Dave Morin (former executive at Facebook) goes in the opposite direction of the social networks like Facebook and Orkut, billing itself as a personal network. What is unique about this new startup is that it limits your number of friends to only 50. Path is essentially a photo-centric service where you can share pictures and images using mobile devices. "You usually have about five people whom you trust most, 20 whom you consider your BFFs that you hang out with all the time and about 50 or so who are your personal network. Path is built for that", said Morin, Co-Founder and Chief Executive of Path. The founders of Path have had consultations with evolutionary anthropologists who have mapped out the brain's limits to retaining close friendships with a large number of people. At a time when social networking has become the norm and when people are all agog about Facebooking or Orkuting, this personal network Path does give some breather to those who don't want to increase their friend count in their social networking profile but have to give in to the many requests of friends of friends or just mere acquaintances. After all not all of us are comfortable sharing details of our lives with the people we have just met, isn't it?

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