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! ;)

We’ve refined our lenses and added two new ones: Country and Lake.

Because privacy is one of our core values, and based on your feedback, it became a priority to remove the option to see everyone in “Top Locals” for Place Stories and “Top Fans” for Music Stories. You let us know that this feature made Path less private than it could be. Now you can only see the activity of your friends and family members on Path, and nothing from anyone else. Life is busy and the world is a hectic place. We’ll make sure your Path is not. Download 2.0.3 here!

We’ve heard feedback from some people using compact Android phones who aren’t getting the Path experience they expect. We believe you deserve an experience from Path that’s as beautiful as the moments you’ve been capturing, so we’re working hard to fix the problem. Thank you for your patience.

We’ve made a few improvements to Path.

Sticky switches to are now switches that reset each time you share a story, so you’ll never accidentally share to other networks. When you choose a photo from your camera roll, we’ll use the location of that photo to inform our place chooser. And check out the new animation and design when you add friends on Path. Download it here.

We are delighted to receive two “Flys” from TechCrunch for Path 2. We have been overwhelmed and delighted by the response and growth of the Path community over the last week. Thank you to all of our loyal early users, and a warm welcome to all of our new users. We hope you continue to enjoy and please send us your feedback anytime. 

Our Co-Founder and CEO Dave Morin discussing Path 2 this week with Loic Le Meur in Paris at Le Web.

So many of you have been enjoying sharing your Path stories to Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare, and now we’ve added one more place to share.  With Path 2.0.1, you can publish to your Tumblr with the tap of a finger.  In addition, we’ve added password recovery and some bug fixes.  Thanks again for using Path!