There are moments when you just want to share something with your friends, albeit not perhaps your Facebook friends. Instead of Facebook, you may opt to share a picture on Path. As you might be aware of it, it’s a recently launched service, which lets users share their messages and videos with small groups.
They are the ones who you think, are a part of your day-to-day chores and want to know even random or innocuous incidents in your life, whereas on Facebook, you may have distant acquaintances or colleagues who would not perhaps be bothered about these little things. May be that you also would not want them to know those things.
‘Path’ to personalized sharing
Path imposes a limit of 50-friends. While sharing a thought, you may do so in private (to be seen only those tagged in the moment); all friends and also all the friends’ of those who are tagged in the moment; or in public (to be shared on Facebook and seen publicly.) The personal network lets you ‘be yourself’ and share life’s moments with a select few. It doesn’t claim to substitute existing social networks, but only to augment them.
An introductory note states:
“We know that if you are sharing with a single person you do not trust, you will not feel comfortable sharing. So we’ve built the personal network model to keep you in control, always. Because your personal network is limited to your 50 closest friends and family, you can always trust that you can post any moment, no matter how personal.
“Simply take a photo with your camera on iPhone and add context around that moment in the form of tags for people, places and things. No following, no friending…just sharing with the people who matter most.”
Sharing sans the feel strangeness
Even the world’s most popular social network appreciates the fact that people are not always keen to share each bit of their personal realm with all ‘friends’. It has in place privacy settings, which help keep control over who will see what. However, many users find these settings a bit tough to set up. Realizing this, it introduced Groups last autumn, for sharing with Facebook friends’ subsets.
Real life groups drive the virtual realm
A couple of months ago, Facebook acquired Beluga. It’s a start-up, which lets people privately share messages and photos with small groups. Just a month ago, Facebook claimed its users had already conceived no less than 50 million groups with a median of mere eight members.
The service also unveiled the Send button that websites can use to allow people sharing certain things with FB groups, after realizing that there wasn’t any way to share with the groups like book club members or a sports team already formed in one’s real life. According to Facebook Groups director of product, Peter Deng, it has emerged as one of the most rapidly growing products and its usage volume has been phenomenal.
