This is quite interesting (and sorry for the long post)

About three years ago I started working on a sharing engine that offers what Path seems to be offering. Three years later and two startups (built using that sharing engine) closed, I can share a few thoughts (and a couple of stories):

Sharing Engine:
We thought sharing was broken. Privacy, permissions, different media files, social networks all around were making things complicated for the average user, etc.

We had this situation at home were my sister just had her first son. She was living in Madrid and my folks back at home in Venezuela.

They wanted updates of their grandson and my sister wanted to send pictures, videos, etc. about him but there was no “definitive” way to do it.

She wanted the sharing experience to be private (or at least we thought so. In retrospect I think we assumed she wanted this) and there wasn't a simple way to do this.

We sat down and came up with this sharing engine that was going to be unique and was going to allow her (and many like her) to share her sons life (and her own) with whomever she wanted, have complete control and was going to be incredibly simple to use. After many brainstorming sessions we finally found the perfect combination:

Users were allow to create their own sharing contexts (in the first startup their were called "buckets" and in the second they were called "albums"). These contexts were by invitation only: only the people you gave access to that context could "interact" with the media inside the context.

These contexts had a set of rules (permissions) that were unchangeable once the contexts was created: the reasoning here is that if you invite someone to that context and the person joins, it's doing so based on a certain promise*
Available in every platform: Desktop, web, mobile.

This simple, yet powerful combination gave birth to what I personally think holds more value that the engine it-self: what I called the “smart news feed”. This new smart news feed, was smart because it only showed what was really interesting to me. And between you and me, it was not really smart per-se, it was just that you only received notifications from the contexts you were a part of.

This had two mayor benefits:

-My news feed only showed activity (comments, uploads, etc) about the contexts I was a part of.

-I was 100% sure that people, not part of a context would receive notifications of my activities in that specific context.

For example:

I had a context that I shared with my folks. We shared pictures, funny videos, football news, etc (my dad loves Football: Go Napoli!)

I also had a context that I shared with my wife. The contents of this contexts were quite different from the one I shared with my folks.

Here is where the newsfeed was important: My folks only got notifications of my activities in the context we shared but not on those activities I did on the context I shared with my wife. Is quite simple, yet very powerful.

Of course this engine has a lot of neat stuff, like the ability to share all types of media you can think of, highly scalable, very fast and so much more.

About our two closed Startups:

On the first one this engine was a part of a bigger app that integrated your entire online life: mail, contacts, Calendar, RSS, IM, etc. We never officially launched so I can’t give you to much insight about the idea (the sharing part at least).

After that, we took the engine and built a Twitter app out of it: Twitalbums.com

The idea was simple: private sharing on Twitter. No one was doing this and we thought, heck let’s be the first ones to do it. The engine is built, all we need to do is connect with Twitter, put it out there and see what happens.

We did and we got some initial traction about 800 users and a review:http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitalbums_private_coll... , but looking back, a couple of things worked against us:

-Our execution was... meh. I mean, we were so focused on the engineering part, that we forgot about the user experience.

-Nature of the platform: Twitter users want to broadcast and be heard. They don’t want to share privately. It seems obvious now... but you know how it goes.

About Path and Instagr.am

I like this dichotomy, because I have actually thought hard about this two apps long before they existed.

First let’s say this: mobile is the correct approach. I think this is were you want to be with either one.

Path: is what I wanted to do with the engine we built.

However, it turns out people are social creatures (go figure!) and being social outweighs the need for privacy.

Instagr.am: is were I evolved our sharing engine (we went from private by default, to public by default, making EXTREMELY easy to be make it private). Instagr.am is going to win on the traction game but loose on the monetization one.

Could Path win on the monetization game? I think so.
Closed groups have some benefits:
You could display HIGHLY targeted advertising to an specific group
You could identify users that get real value out of your service as a group and charge for use
Etc.

However, I think the real value of private sharing (and were the money is) is in the small and medium business and how a tool like (in this case) Path could benefit to mobilize and facilitate communications between employees. I think if the offer is right business will be willing to pay for this (and employees will have no choice but to use it. Remember, Instagr.am already won the traction game)