“Path was the missing link between me and my mother. I left Paris two years ago to come to Silicon Valley. I’ve lived abroad before in London and Berlin, but never this far. My mother is the person I used to interact with the most on a daily basis. Of course she was excited about the opportunity for me to live and work in San Francisco, but she also knew that it meant saying goodbye to our daily chats and laughter.

We promised we would email and call a lot, that we’d use Skype or Facetime all the time. But it didn’t happen. Life and intimate interactions are more spontaneous and can’t be scheduled during a Skype call in the morning for me and late at night for her, or sent through an email you are too tired to write after coming home late from work.

Then, a few weeks ago, my mom sent me a text saying: ‘Axelle, I have an iPhone! We can text and Facetime.’  But my first response was, ‘Congrats! Now go to the App Store, search for ‘Path’ and download it now.’ ‘What is Path?’, she asked.  ’You will be able to follow my life here and how I am doing. You’ll see, download it!’ Five minutes later, she signed up. Thanks to Path’s simplicity, she was engaging all of the features immediately. She checked in at our countryside house, uploaded photos of our dogs, her gardening, her knitting project.

For me, Path is where I share for real. Path is where I do not curate myself to look like what other people expect. I am just me, the person my real friends and family know. For my mom, it’s just the app. she opens every morning to see how I’m doing. Sometimes, I wait for her to wake up on Path just so I can heart it before going to bed. Like any mother, she knows if I am okay just by seeing a current picture or a funny thought. Those are the kind of moments in your life you want your mother to see. Because, when you are far, your parents want to know not only what you are doing, but that you are happy. That’s what Path provides for us.” -Axelle

To Marie and all of the other wonderful mothers, Happy Mother’s Day!

“No shame in my game just par for the path. I try to hone my craft because at hand’s the task.”
- The Move, Beastie Boys

Photo by: Masao Nakagami

The passing of Beastie Boy Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch on Friday May 4th struck the Path office like a stone to an egg. What spilled out were profound memories, shrill sing-a-longs, and a fond farewell. Yes, we are proud Beastie Boys fans here at Path. And those of us who weren’t may now have a better appreciation.

The intimate space on Path that we are working so hard to build has been another place for people to express their sadness in the comfort and company of the people they love. It’s been an honor to witness and participate in the power of this empathy. Path has always understood the importance of family and friends in times of fighting for your right to party, or in this case, grieve.

On May 4th, the Friday of MCA’s passing, people on Path shared 6,000% more Beastie Boys music stories than the day before. Sabotage, Intergalactic and Fight for Your Right were the favorite remembrances on Path. Moral support through commentary and emotions was enormous.

Path would like to thank MCA for his legacy and his fans for supporting the band and each other in this time of regret. If you are interested in supporting a cure for the cancer which took Adam well before his time, click here. In the meantime, run your Licensed To Ill record ragged and don’t live life any less fully than MCA did. Because you can’t, and you won’t, and you don’t stop.

It’s the surprise of fresh snow, a reunion of great friends, that song that accompanied the cross-country road trip. The moments in life that you want to preserve and remember, some of these are moments you have posted on Path. A number of you have found ways to reach out and share these moments with us, and we have been moved and humbled by your initiative.

You have inspired us to make a call to the rest of you who also may be interested in sharing.

Only you know what Path means to you. Only you know the most poignant, pivotal and extraordinary moments you have captured. What was it about this moment in your life that made you want to preserve it?

Send us the story of your favorite Path moment to moments@path.com. If it is a photo or video, feel free to attach it to your email. With your permission, we will feature some of these on our blog so that the world can experience them too. We thank you in advance for sharing, and thank you for using Path.

We love photography here at Path. It’s the most simple and expressive way to capture a moment, so it’s always been an important part of what we do.

For almost a year now, Path for iOS has had a wonderful assortment of free photo filters that we call Lenses. We call them Lenses because when you turn one on, your phone’s camera comes to life — you’re instantly peering through the filter, like you do through the lens of a camera. You are able to see your beautifully filtered high-quality picture before or after you take your photo.

For those of you using Path for Android, Lenses have not been a part of your experience. Until now.

We’re beyond excited to share with you the product of many hours of hard work from the wonderful Android team here at Path. With Path 2.1.5 on a supported Android phone (2.3.3 and above), you can now take photos using Path’s lovely assortment of Lenses — Pro, Ansel, Instant, Diana, Lomo, Country and Lake!

Lenses will allow you to better capture the moment — to add the sentiment and the personality that you want to remember and share.

Well, that’s all for now. Much more to come. Be sure to grab Path 2.1.5 on your Android phone from Google Play and enjoy.

Every day, all over the world, more people are sharing their stories with loved ones on Path. The response internationally has been amazing. We’ve heard from students and professors to avid travelers and programmers — all offering time and knowledge to help improve our translations. We thank you for your help!

Today we’re taking another step to improve the Path experience for those of you abroad. We have set up a new translation platform, powered by Smartling, which allows you to sign up and edit the languages available for Path, submit translations and work with others to ensure your language is fully supported in future versions of Path.

Currently we are working on translations for Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Swedish, Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinese. In the future we are planning to add Traditional Chinese, Thai, Arabic, Bahasa Indonesian, Russian, Turkish, Malay, Dutch, Greek, Norwegian Bokmål and English (UK).

If you would like to help with these or another language, please visit translate.path.com to get started. And if you have any questions, always feel free to email us at translate@path.com.

Thank you! Gracias! Danke!  謝謝！ どうもありがとう!

We take privacy and security seriously, and we believe your data deserves to be well-protected. That’s why, with the release of Path 2.1.1, we are enhancing our security by hashing user contact data so that it is anonymized. This means last names, phone numbers, email addresses, Twitter handles and Facebook IDs. We collect this data to connect you with those who are closest to you.

We hope our actions set a new standard in this field as we strive to serve you, our users, first. Thank you for your trust, and thank you for using Path.

Your alarm goes off at six a.m. It’s a good day for a run, so you tie your laces and step out the door. The first steps work out the morning stiffness but you start to hit your stride, and soon you’ve reached your route’s first hill. Your legs are beginning an early burn. Then through your earphones comes a welcome sound. It’s your dad, your sister, your best friend––they’re sending cheers your way. Because this morning, the moment your shoes hit the pavement, they saw you start your run on Path. They’re supporting you each step, from across the city, across the country, across the globe. You sprint the hill. With their help, you make it count.

This is the story of your morning run. It’s an important part of your day; it’s how you stay fit and healthy and happy. Now with Path 2.1, you can record and share it on Path.

From the routine to the extraordinary, there are countless special moments in your day to share with the people you love. We want to help you journal all of them in your Path. To do this, we’ve built the first version of the Path API to enable you to include stories from your other favorite mobile apps. After all, the story of your life is reflected in the apps you use every day.

We are delighted to announce Nike as the first Path API partner. Starting today, you can connect Nike+ GPS to Path to share your runs, in real time, with your family and close friends.

The completion of your workout automatically creates a beautiful Running Story in your Path––a map of your route dotted with pictures of those who cheered you on along the way. You can see your best pace, mile markers, your time and distance. Whether you run marathons or run for the morning paper, you can keep a journal of it on Path, track your habits and set goals with the support of the people you love.

Running is just the start. Nike is pioneering an entirely new way to integrate activity and sport in your everyday life. In the next few weeks, you will be able to connect the revolutionary NIKE+ FuelBand to your Path to journal your daily activity. We can’t wait to share it with you; stay tuned.

For more information about the Path and Nike+ GPS integration you can visit: http://path.com/nike

We’ve also taken time with 2.1 to improve two popular Path stories: Music and Photos. To Music, we’ve added what we call Music Match, a single button you can tap to record and recognize the music playing around you, so even an unfamiliar song in a coffee shop or a newly released track playing at a friend’s house can be remembered and shared easily with the ones you love on Path. For Photos we’ve worked hard to refine each of our free lenses, and we’ve also added a new comic book-inspired lens called Pow. Camera previews are now high-definition, and a new advanced feature that separates focus and exposure points will help you take beautiful photos, even in the trickiest lighting situations.

It’s our hope that you can use Running, Photo and Music Stories to better share life with the people you love. We hope you enjoy Path 2.1.

If you’re interested in our API, please let us know here.

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day and all over the world, love was being shared on Path. We wanted to share some stats that made us smile.

• The word “love” was used in comments 26% more
• The words “romantic” or “romance” were used 153% more
• The words “marry,” “date” or “engage” were used 54% more
• The percentage of moments tagged with other people was up 33% 
• 43.5% of emotions posted were hearts

The top five songs listened to on Valentine’s Day:

1. Someone like You by ADELE 
2. Young, Wild and Free (feat. Bruno Mars) by Wiz Khalifa
3. Set Fire to the Rain by ADELE
4. We Found Love (feat. Calvin Harris) by Rihanna
5. A Thousand Years by Christina Perry

The top five artists listened to on Valentine’s Day:

1. Drake
2. ADELE
3. Rihanna
4. Coldplay
5. Beyonce

Thank you for spreading the love on Path. And from us to you, Happy Valentine’s Day.

“We thought we were doing this the right way. It turns out, we made a mistake.” - Interview: Path CEO Explains Why His App Is Collecting Address Book Data - Wired

We made a mistake. Over the last couple of days users brought to light an issue concerning how we handle your personal information on Path, specifically the transmission and storage of your phone contacts.

As our mission is to build the world’s first personal network, a trusted place for you to journal and share life with close friends and family, we take the storage and transmission of your personal information very, very seriously.

Through the feedback we’ve received from all of you, we now understand that the way we had designed our ‘Add Friends’ feature was wrong. We are deeply sorry if you were uncomfortable with how our application used your phone contacts.

In the interest of complete transparency we want to clarify that the use of this information is limited to improving the quality of friend suggestions when you use the ‘Add Friends’ feature and to notify you when one of your contacts joins Path––nothing else. We always transmit this and any other information you share on Path to our servers over an encrypted connection. It is also stored securely on our servers using industry standard firewall technology.

We believe you should have control when it comes to sharing your personal information. We also believe that actions speak louder than words. So, as a clear signal of our commitment to your privacy, we’ve deleted the entire collection of user uploaded contact information from our servers. Your trust matters to us and we want you to feel completely in control of your information on Path.

In Path 2.0.6, released to the App Store today, you are prompted to opt in or out of sharing your phone’s contacts with our servers in order to find your friends and family on Path. If you accept and later decide you would like to revoke this access, please send an email to service@path.com and we will promptly see to it that your contact information is removed.

We care deeply about your privacy and about creating a trusted place for you to share life with your close friends and family. As we continue to expand and grow we will make some mistakes along the way. We commit to you that we will continue to be transparent and always serve you, our users, first.

We hope this update clears up any confusion. You can find Path 2.0.6 in the App Store here.

Sincerely,

Dave Morin
Co-Founder and CEO

To each new moment, each relationship, each challenge and beginning, you bring a painter’s palette of experience. It’s dotted and smeared with every song you’ve heard, every landscape you’ve discovered and every person you’ve loved. Your moments on Path are only tiny snapshots in the enormous landscape of your life, but each fills out the picture and makes your Path something deeper, richer and more authentically you.

The photographer Marc Riboud said, “Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.” Since the earliest days of Path, we’ve believed in this great power of photos and videos to savor and capture life. That’s why, in Path 2.0.5, we’ve created a way to further enhance and personalize these moments with the addition of Depth, the best way to focus and tilt-shift your photos and the only way to tilt-shift your videos on the iPhone.

Depth can be used to focus on a specific piece of your photos or videos, or create a miniaturizing effect (a.k.a. tilt-shift) by creating a point or plane of clarity and blurring the surroundings.

Depth works in both Spot and Landscape modes and can be adjusted while recording a video or after snapping a photo.

For the best results, make sure you have good lighting and photograph something from a heightened angle.

Packed in Path 2.0.5:

• Depth: Tilt-shift your photos and videos in either Spot or Landscape modes.
• Pinch, tap, rotate and zoom photos in full screen.
• Tap and rotate videos in full screen.
• Links are now tappable.
• Friend requests are sorted by time.
• Bug fixes.

Path 2.0.5 is in the App Store:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/path/id403639508?mt=8

We are delighted to be partnered with Nike and the new Nike+ FUELBAND to journal your daily activity on Path. Share life and #makeitcount. Coming soon. Learn more here. 

We are delighted to have been nominated for 2 Crunchies this year: Best Social App and Best Design. 

If you have a moment, please vote for us!

Path now includes the ability to tweet who you are with.

After a long and friendly coexistence, two apps have become one. And the pair has settled on a name: Path 2. 

Without further ado, we’re winding down With. Use Path 2 to share and record moments with your friends and family and enjoy the option to post to Twitter. 

Be ready for a future of surprises with Path 2—who knows what this marriage might bring! ;)