Path is not your typical social network yet many people familiar with social media try to use it like every other network. They spend their time trying to friend as many people as possible to create yet another noisy stream (#yans).

The application is actually built around the principle of Dunbar’s number and beckons you to invite your closest personal relationships so that you can have the most meaningful experiences. I recently sat down with Path CEO, Dave Morin to ask what people should do when someone that is not an intimate person friend wants to be a part of their social graph. Dave believes that you are doing people a favor if you ignore their request. Path is supposed to only be the content that you care about and that you want to see from the people that you care the most about. It is your personal journal and so you should not have anyone reading it that you would not want to share the fact that your kid scored the game winning goal in the soccer game.

 

I hear from people all the time that Path is incredibly cool looking, but that it is not for them because their friends are not on the application. I have a bit of a different philosophy. Users who like the concept of Path should just start using it to do their life journaling. The app is incredibly versatile and can be your means to publish content to twitter, Facebook, foursquare and even Tumblr and it makes a very cool timeline that can quickly remind you of all of your adventures. Create all of your mobile content on Path, push it to other networks when you feel it is appropriate, but make Path the hub of your mobile content universe. Do this even if you do not have any friends on Path. If you need help getting people on to Path, ask them to take the Path Challenge.

If you journal, when you start to work on your friends and family, you can show them how beautiful the app is with a lot of your own data. You can take them through the fun creation process, show them how quickly it uploads video and how easy it is to look back over time on the things that you did. Dave tells me that people love to take pictures of food, menus and other artifacts that give them clues as to how the experience was at a restaurants, bar or other awesome place. I believe that Path is what Gowalla wanted to be. It’s your personal log of not only your adventures but of your life in general. And it’s going to get better with the Nike Fuelband integration which will export data to Path via bluetooth.

Remember, Path is an intimate social network. You are supposed to only be friends with people who you are close enough to to care about all of the content they create. This is what makes Path awesome. I am using my Path to get to interact with the startup scene, share with allen & gerritsen people and with some very close friends like my book co-author, Aaron Strout. I am actively trying to recruit my family, but they are still resisting, yet they seem to almost be coming around. And I will not rest until they do.

The new Path user interface is gorgeous. Dave Morin’s team has come up with a user experience that will change the way that people think about application design.  Path abandons the standard bottom toolbar that most consumer behavior oriented applications have for 2 buttons in the sticky header and a red plus sign that looms on the bottom left hand of the screen. Clicking the plus sign reveals a swiss army knife that allows you to add a new journal entry starting with a photo, a person, location, song, thought or your lucidity state. The last of which would be even cooler if it was integrated with life stats hardware like the Fitbit or Jawbone Up.

The new user interface is gorgeous. It is UX pr0n and this version of Path will change or at least challenge the way that every app designer thinks about every consumer app they design moving forward. One of our best designers, Charlie Guerrero picked it up for the first time this morning and was blown away by how fluid and responsive the app is for everything that is going on.

The application is clearly designed after the Facebook timeline. They have adopted the cover concept as well as the entire timeline concept. What Path does better than any other application is that it tells you who has seen your post. That is really quite bold.

Here is the problem. It is still just Path. While I think that the new design pattern will inspire a lot of curiosity, I see more applications adopting this style of design than people actually making Path part of their daily routine. In other words, in spite of the fact that it can post to Facebook, twitter and foursquare it’s not going to replace Facebook mobile unless Facebook acquires Path and decides to replace their mobile experience with Path. Path is decidedly cooler, but people will reject it because 700 million of their closest friends are on Facebook and this is essentially an alternative.  The adoption of many of Facebook timeline’s design patterns coupled by the fact that founder Dave Morin is ex-Facebook and still has strong relationships could be an indication of an exit strategy. Time will tell.

Another thought though: It knows where you are, who you are with and it knows if you are sleeping and knows if you’re awake. If they just add an indicator for whether you are bad or good they could have a suitor at the North Pole.

 

In my last exciting post, I talked about how Ditto unleashes the power of semantic data and how awesome it would be if you could harness the power of the data behind a location in foursquare or Gowalla or a dish in one of my favorite applications,foodspotting.

You may recall that Ditto allows users to express their intent in a particular neighborhood and that it does it in such a way that it does not leave much to the imagination. In other words, we KNOW you want coffee, what kind you want and where you are.

Imagine businesses were to begin taking advantage of this and providing a user reasons to come see them. What if businesses could monitor for people who needed them similar to the way that Uber allows black car drivers to see if people need a ride during down time. The example I always use (and I am waiting for this to happen) is that I am in a neighborhood, I say that I want a latte and a coffee show responds with “Hey Mike, come on in. We will save you a spot next to the window and you can use our free wi-fi. Do you like caramel in your latte? What kind of milk?” I would be thrilled and I would act immediately without worrying about whether they were giving me a dollar off.

If businesses could use Ditto similar to how Uber is used, to fill times when they are not full, to attract new customers with or without offers and people could do everything from accept a deal to pay with Ditto (similar to what is now happening with Zaarly) it would open up a great deal of possibilities for interesting data and segmentation. Take a look at this concept of a merchant side ditto application that allows a coffee shop to monitor the area “Bananatown”.

Notice that each of the people who want coffee in Bananatown have a series of stats. These are based on their actions through the Ditto application.

• Probability: This ratio is the amount of times a person has acted versus the number of times they have expressed an intention to act. Below it is also the true number (in this case 48/50). This tells the merchant how likely the person is to act on an offer. Mike is extremely likely.
• Offers: The next number tells how many offers Mike currently has and whether or not he has acted on one.
• Average / Remaining: This tells the merchant on average how long Mike takes to act and how much time has elapsed since then, making it easy for them to tell whether they should act.

I also imagine having ways to tell what kinds of offers that Mike responds to – deals, invitations etc. I see businesses being able to set thresholds based on certain types of activators and automatically pushing an offer within a neighborhood (geo-fence).

How else would you like to see the data segmented? Do you think that this kind of merchant model is the key to Ditto user adoption?

The speedy evolution of location based social networking and the flexibility of Foursquare have given birth to a new kind of social loyalty. Tasti DLite is one of the first companies to use the Foursquare API to create a program that is integrated with the customer’s social graph as well as their location. 
 

 
Here is how it works in a nutshell. If you join the Tasti DLite Tasti Treat Card loyalty program you get a loyalty card. Subsequently, every time you buy something you get a point for each dollar you spend. Fifty points gets you something for free. A customer can hook their card up to their Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare accounts and get bonus points for allowing the brand to access their social personas.
 
A customer can allow Tasti DLite to post to their Facebook or Twitter accounts to announce what they are doing and allow it to check them in on Foursquare. Each of these is then tallied as a bonus points which helps them reach 50 points faster. So the customer gets a passive Foursquare check in and can let their friends know that they are getting a deal at Tasti DLite.
 
The big question however is: “What will social media look like if every brand starts doing this? Could it become a Michael Bay movie?”
 

What do you think?

Google Buzz has the potential to be THE ultimate social media dialogue and content aggregation machine. Here are three short-term ideas that will make it infinitely more usable and convert the skeptics.

Compact the Content

Problem: Showing the buzz and all the comments (even just 10 – and how are they decided?) is really noisy. Particularly when you follow people who get serious engagement like Jason Calacanis, Pete Cashmore and “Mr. Noisy” Robert Scoble. Users will decide when they want to read the comments. Result: more content is read. I do not see a decrease in engagement. The people who don’t like to read comments were not going to read them anyway.

Filter Out Channels

Problem: Some people are still using multiple social media tools. They want to continue to use them for what they like to use them for and they are not coming to Buzz to have that content duplicated. OK. Let them remove the content they do not want to see. Caveat: They can’t remove Buzz original content.

Here’s a quick and easy way to remove the content you do not care about.

Clicking “Filter Channels Options” takes your to this screen that allows you to set options globally and also to change your mind if you decide you want the content back. (Yeah, I grabbed the channels from FriendFeed).

Make Buzz Post to Twitter

That’s game over.

Does good design come from good designers? Sort of. Good design does not even start with design. Whether for marketing, technology, product, etc it starts with a deep understanding of the needs of the consumer and the business stakeholders. If you have not worked with a next-generation agency, let me give you some insight into the process.

excerpt from the #specwork09 discussion

• Sessions begin with definition of business problems. We actually go into them hoping to define a business problem or series of problems to solve. It is not about “we want to design something” yet.
• Audience Intelligence teams learn the needs, size, segments and location of the marketplace.
• Strategists start to define the idea and the brand pillars or align the idea to current brand pillars. Design, Audience Intelligence, Media, and Analytics resources are involved to protect design interests, media availability and possibilities, and success measurement.
• Consensus on ideas is built.
• Campaigns are defined. Briefs are written.
• Analytics teams figure out how to measure success, spot trends and forecast futures.
• Now we design!
• Execute
• Measure
• Rinse
• Repeat

Through this process a connection is built between the agency and the client. The agency treats the client’s brand as their own and takes a level of responsibility for success. The designers are part of the strategy. They understand the process. They can discuss the pillars with the planners and strategists. They get true audience insight in a way that a single specification sheet cannot bring to light. They can talk to the measurement folks about how we define success. They weave themselves into the brand fabric and in some cases they follow a similar process across projects.

Your brand, your campaign, your SUCCESS depend on your experience and your marketing. The way I see it, you can pay a premium [or put together a creative model that allows an agency to be payed based on your success] for any agency that is thoughtfully integrated or you can throw it into the one-off crowdsourcing blender and hope you get a smoothie.

When talking to marketing managers, the subject of segmentation often comes up. The conversation can seem forced and usually takes a turn from casual talk about business to a certain bitter formality, probably because now we’re talking about data. These marketing managers have never tasted our variety of data! Theirs is all crunchy-creamy like the grubs on Fear Factor. Yuck!

Expensive : Complicated : Useless

These are words they have used to describe segmentation! Further investigation usually reveals that their segmentation study was conducted so long ago that no one really remembers why. In one case, some muckety-muck told a group of analysts to do it and so they did exactly what he told them to do. No one really knew why it was being done.

Of course then nosy consultants like me come along and ask the question. Why did you do this segmentation? What does it all mean? It used to shock me when they would say that “it’s just the way we have always done it”.

Segmentation is not about grouping data for the sake of grouping data. Segmentation should have purpose. It should be used to solve a particular problem. It is useful for determining sales regions/territories, marketing message and campaign optimization, risk management, web visitor behavior classification etc etc etc.

Each morning when I come to work, I try to steal a few minutes of time to read four web comics. I have tried a bunch of others, but I find that these are the ones that give me a mental boost that kicks off my day in a way that caffeine cannot. In other words, “clever” is my morning drug of choice.

I love the UPS whiteboard campaign.

The ads are mesmerizing they are sticky and the creative does not get in the way of the message.
The timing is impeccable. Andy Azula, the artist in the ads and creative director for The Martin Agency, makes what he is doing look easy. The tongue-in-cheek humor has longevity and is the inspiration for some ridiculous youtube knockoffs.

The Martin Agency got almost everything right. The music is perfect. Nearly. You see, the band is called…

THE POSTAL SERVICE.

Google introduced a new line of googlevative designs for their iGoogle personal portal. They assembled some of the best known designers, artists and musicians to build a series of trendy skins as part of Google’s global effort to allow its users a way to make their experience unique. Bonus they can also express their love for some of their favorite artists.