Private social network Path now serves 10 million users

Private social networking website Path is now home to 10 million users. Dave Morin, Path’s CEO put up an image on his Path account announcing the social networking website’s landmark figures.

The image simply showed “10,000,006” under the heading “users” with a happy Morin commenting “10 million” on it. The social networking website later took to Twitter to officially announce the user mark. “10 million users and growing! We’re so excited,” the tweet read.

In February 2012, Path crossed the two million user mark, two months after the app was re-launched. The climb to gain more followers remained a slow one till June with the app adding only one million new users from February. Post that, Path has added users to its fold at a breakneck speed to reach 10 million in less than a year from June.

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Dave Morin announces 10 million users on his Path

Launched in November 2010, Path allows you to connect with your closest friends and family on its service. Making personal contact the foundation of the social networking website, Path allows you to connect with only 150 people at any given point of time.

The service allows you to use it as a journal with your updates being broadcast only to your contacts. Using a simple chooser button, you can post photos, videos, your location, what you’re listening to currently. You can even post your thoughts, when you go to bed and when you wake up too. Think of it as Faceboook, Twitter, Instagram and Twitter all rolled into one for only 150 of your closest friends.

The app has received regular updates to endear it to regular users. Only last month an update added the private messaging and stickers feature to Path. Calling the update “Path 3,” the social networking website added the ability to chat with your contacts privately and even form small groups. You can also use stickers as a replacement to the emoticon inside your chat messages.

Path, in its run up to reaching the 10 million user mark has faced several privacy issues too. In February last year and in the same month this year, Path was hit by controversies. Last year, it was revealed that Path was allegedly storing users’ address books.

Just as the company had settled charges with the Federal Trade Commission, another controversy hit it. Security researcher Jeffrey Paul alleged that Path’s iOS app was using the embedded EXIF tag location information from your photos in the iOS Camera Roll to geo-tag the posts you put up, causing a bit a of a privacy scare. Path promised to look into the matter.

The social networking website is a very unique one as it limits your friend list to help you add only people you trust and care about. It’s now to be seen what features Path can add in such limited conditions to retain the huge user base it has built.