Path has been down the rocky road before, with a layoff and a couple of key people leaving to start their own companies, but the mobile social networking startup is back with a vengeance and this time, it hopes it's on the right path with its own standalone mobile messaging app.
Dubbed Path Talk, Path's mobile messaging app works pretty much like the messaging feature on the core Path app and includes the more than 1,500 stickers that made Path popular with early adopters. Path has also jumped into the ephemeral messaging bandwagon started by Snapchat and made even more popular by Facebook. Messages sent through Path Talk will be deleted from Path's servers 24 hours after being sent. Users will also find a feature called Ambient Status, which broadcasts to their friends information such as their location, transit status or even the song that is playing on their phones.
"We never thought we'd be in the messaging business," admits Path founder and chief executive Dave Morin. "There was this global realization last year that breaking up the app into multiple apps is the way to go. Our realization was that Path was a pretty good Swiss Army knife."
To encourage adoption, Path also released its limit on the number of friends a user can have, one of the unique features that distinguished the mobile social network from its competitors. But Path, which currently has 23 million sign-ups and 4 million active daily users, needs more users for it to compete with apps that have a bigger user base. Snapchat, for instance, has been installed 60 million times and has more than 30 million active users sending 400 million disappearing messages a day.
But what could be the app's game-changing feature is not available yet. In a blog post written Friday, Morin announced that Path is set to acquire another messaging service startup called TalkTo, which allows users to contact businesses via text. The acquisition, Morin says, will integrate the TalkTo service into Path Talk as a feature called Place Messaging, which users can then use to, for example, make reservations at a restaurant, ask about the availability of tapioca flour at Trader Joe's or schedule an appointment with their dentist.
And Path hopes to go beyond simply allowing customers to communicate with businesses. Morin says he can see a future that combines e-commerce and messaging in a single app. The Path founder cites TalkTo chief executive Stuart Levinson, who said that majority of the messages sent to businesses buying intent. These could count as what he calls "highly qualified leads," and Morin hopes businesses would be willing to pay Path to get a hold of those.
"We want to bring a differentiated and powerful new use case to our users," Morin says. "We want to bring commerce and messaging together in a way that is first-user."
