Path Talk - Smart, Private Messaging

Awesome update, nice to see the messenger get some more focus. I’ve always loved how conversations felt on Path and how easy it was to share different types of content. Seemed like Path nailed a lot of that before anyone else was even thinking about sharing anything other than text. Will be interesting to see how talking to places (which is rather impersonal) lives along side chatting with close friends. Also, I’m adding this update as evidence to my “Tab bars always win” folder. Its been interesting seeing almost every big social app go through some form of hamburger/side nav to land back at a tab bar. Something to be said about the clarity of always knowing exactly where in the app you are and easily being able to hop to anywhere else.

@syedaliahmed one of the design principles we are following here is to follow our users. If Ambient Status becomes popular on its own, then we will look at focusing more on it and even breaking it out into its own app. Generally, based on what becomes the most popular and users desire to access the most, we will do more of this. Our goal is to learn as much as we can from each app we do, the successes of each app, but most importantly the failures. So that for the next app all of our learnings are best applied.

@scottmeinzer we agree, today Places have no place in Messaging. The interactions you have with Places are deeply impersonal, often requiring you to have akward conversations on the phone with a stranger, and then wait on hold wasting valuable time with family and friends. We hope that we can create a more personal relationship for you with the Places in your life by enabling you to text them to get reservations, make appointments, check for product availability...all so you can not just have more time back to live life with family and friends, but to also have superpowers to coordinate the important Places in your life that you gather together.

@scottmeinzer also, on tab bars, we finally agree. After years of going after the drawers approach, we did a ton of user testing. The data is clear, the users have spoken: tab bars always win.

@davemorin imho it's fascinating to see that while communication is at the core of human desire the UX/interactions of messaging services is still broadly lacking even with the highly 'successful' ones like whatsapp/groupme etc. But it's really really bad when you take just one step away from them and look at apps where messaging is 'just a feature'. (eg we at @blossom_io could do way better here as well). the very few companies that 'get it': * slack — team communication/chat * intercom — b2b CRM SaaS platform * brandid — personal shopping assistant w/ chat as main UI * layer — messaging infrastructure/sdk

@davemorin great strategy. But what is your thought on the argument that having multiple apps means lack of focus where you don't give any one enough time to grow?

@__tosh technology is still so hard for all of us to interface with. We still have a long way to go in making it a meaningful part of the human experience in a way that delivers happiness to the user.

@davemorin @__tosh Interesting discussion Dave and Thomas, and also appreciate the mention of BRANDiD "We think the intersection of messaging and commerce is a huge opportunity" -- this is spot on - it's the next wave of customer service focused commerce - Zappos was the first wave

@arush we agree. Let's partner!

@davemorin lol, would love to, was just talking with our engineering team about how a common messaging protocol (Layer) across all apps could benefit the whole ecosystem, e.g. request a restaurant reservation with Path Talk, reply via Slack, tag your buddies. Many other services could fit in here (including BRANDiD) and would be giant leaps towards fixing the human x tech interface issue we all experience