A photo mobile social start-up, Path, was launched with great promise and much fanfare late last year. Its founder, Dave Morin, was among the early Facebook employees who had played a part in developing Facebook Connect. Everyone had assumed Mr. Morin, who previously worked at Apple, well understood the next big phenomenon or the obvious logical thing in mobile and social realm.

But Path did not really stick with users mostly because there were probably too many constraints to hinder it: Users were limited to just 50 friends on the photo mobile social service; They were not allowed to comment on photos and videos of other people. Another competitor, Instagram, had meanwhile captured the minds of a majority of photo sharers. But new Path wants to them win them over with the following new features:

• The first Path seemed a bit like a small party since only a few people nibbled on the free stuff. Now available on Android and iOS mobile devices, Path is hoping to rekindle the product with a version, which updates as Path 2.0.
• Although a majority of mobile apps tend to stick to the user interface techniques convention — putting the camera capture button in an app’s bottom-middle, for instance — the new Path version stands apart from others in the fray by unveiling a new design.
• Path introduces a button in the app’s left corner. It animates a number of icons, when pressed, springing out to interact with the user. The icons let people snap photographs when they click on a camera logo, plus check-in to locations with other friends via location icon or inform Path that they are resting.
• A time stamp at the right only shows up when a user happens to scroll through the app, indicating the time and day friends updated their Path. Path 2.0 has a wide array of new ‘moments’, which can be shared, like the music that people are listening to, who and where they are with, their status updates, and when they sleep or wake up.
• There is another new feature ‘neighborhood’ that updates friends to the current neighborhood automatically, which you are in. It can easily be turned off or on from the app itself for obvious privacy reasons.
• The biggest change is in the way the service has decided to extend the number of friends users can share on the network, now increased to 150 people. Three times bigger than the earlier version, the idea is still to keep the whole experience ‘highly personal’ on Path as it’s essentially meant to be rather a personal journal where people can capture and retain intimate moments of their lives; a smart journal of sorts.

Path wants the users to feel comfortable while sharing certain moments with their friends. Hence, privacy is a significant factor in designing the new release, wherein everything remains private by default.