I used to be a Path fanboy. It became the first application which got right everything other social networks got wrong:

• There was zero concern about who would see what.
• It allowed me to connect with my tech savvy friends yet finally include my mother and mother-in-law, who will never sign up for anything except an email address.
• It removed all noise social networks typically inject. Instead, it’s only the most important moments in life.
• It added sound to life casting, which invokes a more emotional memory.
• Using Path was so ridiculously easy. Take a picture or 10-second video, pick a group of nouns (people, place, and thing), and you’re done.
• And, most importantly, it made viewing past moments easy. You ever notice how anything you create in Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or whatever is impossibly lost? They are moments in time that are digested and thrown away within minutes. Forgotten forever. Good luck trying to find anything. (This is why Facebook is making a push to the “timeline” feature—it realizes it has no time axis, which I’ve called the “z-axis” to its social graph for years.) Path made it so I could browse these important moments in genius ways.

Recently, Path upgraded to a second version. It has been heralded as a design masterpiece. I think it has wrecked the magic.

They are attempting to be more like Foursquare, Facebook, and the like. The level of noise is absurd. I could care less about when someone went to sleep or where. I could care less what song they are listening to (I have social music services or personal conversation for that). I could care less about integration with other social networks. I could care less about the passive “check in” system a la Foursquare, which basically creates a moment only scoped to the “place” noun, and does it automatically whenever you check Path.

Path is about the simple capture of life’s most amazing moments, an easy way to share them regardless of digital divide, tight privacy, and easy access to those moments sometime in the future. Version is lost this vision.

And, regrettably, Version 2 is buggy as heck. I haven’t been able to post a moment since updating because the app crashes. This is so sad that yesterday at my extended family christmas, my mother and grandmother both asked “why they don’t get those cool emails anymore with the fun pictures”. Path has changed their lives too.

I would have paid $/mo for the old Path. Now, they are just another also-ran social network who lost what made them magical.