sep 5, 2013 - Path Is Trying to Define Your Inner Circle

Description:

“Our worldview has always been concentric,” Mr. Morin said in an interview this week in Path’s glass-walled headquarters on the top floor of a San Francisco office tower. “Inner Circle is designed for those people that you’re spending a lot of time with.”

It’s a problem that other social networks are also struggling with. The Google Plus social network is built on the principle that all your friends and acquaintances should be sorted into groups, with whom you then share information. Facebook, which has nearly 1.2 billion users, initially favored more openness but has over the years added a host of privacy controls that allow users to sort their friends into groups like “close friends” and “acquaintances” and share items just with a specific group or even with particular individuals.

But fiddling with such settings is daunting to all but the most determined users.

Path is trying to make the process much simpler for its users, who now number around 20 million, up from five million less than a year ago. You simply go through your list of friends and click on a star next to the names you want to add to your inner circle.