So then why hasn’t Path taken off in high schools across America yet? You might say it’s difficult to run against an enormous incumbent like Facebook. You’d be right, except Instagram ran such an effective and popular campaign it was bought out by an enormous incumbent. Maybe it’s a wave of luck and timing that Path can’t seem to find. My guess is it’s just hard to sell to anyone, not just teens. And stickers and private messages won’t change that. Being a hybrid of existing services, it’s challenging for Path to convince us to switch over without some obvious hook — Twitter’s limited set of characters, Instagram’s filters, old Facebook’s network exclusivity, that gets people insatiably curious and signing up. Path’s problem is that the hook it does have, i.e., being able to find that footing between what’s personal and what’s public, thereby letting us feel like our lives are shared rather than exposed, is hard to succinctly convey in a single line of copy. Figuring that out should be higher on the list than stickers.
Shadoe Huard, Re: Path 3.0 and Teens