Path: Providing a safe and comfortable social circle for people

Come up with a hypothesis, if you need to borrow, who will be the one who can really lend you money? A fan you've never met on Weibo? Or you in the net through six degrees of space to get friends? The answer is self-evident, and ultimately the real family and friends around you, those who really deserve your trust, so even in the social network so developed today, you do not need to meet so many people. So the path exists only if people need a safe and comfortable social circle that gives them more security and helps them build a more trustworthy social circle.

When the Internet is opening everything up to you, a kind of loneliness you've never had before, so Facebook has a group of friends in your family, but it's still open, and it still makes you feel insecure from time to time, and you often lose your language, So Dave Morin, a former Facebook employee, made a path application that allowed only 150 friends in the name of anti-social. The premise of path existence is that people need a safe and comfortable social circle.

More recently, this premise is proving to be there. At the beginning of April, Tencent invested in a circle of social Everyme, online two days, the number of registered users reached 24,000, the number of people in the circle has exceeded 200,000. On April 17, Path received a B-round financing of more than 30 million dollars, nearly 3 times times higher than the first round of financing 8.65 million dollars. May 3, a couple of social pair won 4.2 million dollars in seed investment.

A more powerful proof of the social application of acquaintances is the establishment of business models. On the March 12, at an open API press conference, Dave mentions the ultimate business model of PATH, selling virtual products rather than advertising. Path wants users to enhance the value of the product they want to express by buying a virtual product or a specific "experience."

VCNC, a South Korean start-up company, is planning to collaborate with a number of businesses to support coupons, or to push couples ' dinners, romantic tours and other services, inclusive. In addition, inclusive also has to provide users with high-resolution photo backup and video upload and other paid services. Currently, inclusive has 35,000 users, of whom 54% are weekly active users.

After Facebook's successful launch, people are exploring whether an acquaintance, social or social, will become a threat to Facebook. There is no guarantee that there will be no new social model. But one thing is certain, the acquaintance social model has matured, it can justly divide a slice of the market, its product appeal has even been refined to the cultural level.

into the torrent

As the latest industry in line with international standards, internet entrepreneurs in China have also been aware of the market potential of acquaintances. In fact, in 2011 years, a lot of capital in domestic capital market began to import into this entrepreneurial enterprise. At the end of last year and earlier this year, there were a group of acquaintances and social tools springing up, time flow, love of the exchange, happy under the United States carved, drip, footprints and so on.

Tao, founder of the time stream, looks like the pair of the lovers social is the stage of the product, passionate lovers will play, but after marriage may not be so closely linked. This will allow the entire social tool to constantly summon new users. and similar Everyme circle needs to have a huge user base, only has the relations, can establish the circle, only then can play, but the start-up enterprise at first cannot like Tencent to have the huge flow.

Eventually, Tao created his own time stream after a small proportion of the path's elegant interface. Like other acquaintances, users can share pictures and text with their friends anytime, anywhere. The difference is that different types of pictures and text can be automatically categorized into different folders. This is the equivalent of integrating fragmented social information systems, where users go home without having to organize their photos, and then write their own stories.

Tao thinks, this avoids the stage that the couple socialize, love can write a love thing language, after marriage can write child's story. At the same time, do not need to be like Everyme that must first have the relationship of existence, in no relationship, users can write their own stories to entertain.

In April, Tao and the team launched the latest version of the Android version of the time stream and the iphone version. In Tao and the team in Shanghai's office locations to improve the user experience, Beijing's Putian Desheng Science and Technology Park also has a group of young people engaged in the perfect work of love. This is an application that uploads video and pictures and realizes private sharing, and users can divide their contacts into different circles and share them with different videos and pictures.

Compared to other acquaintances ' social applications, the advantage of a love-exchange is strong video processing capabilities. In the social application of acquaintances, it's easy to expand from video to pictures, from pictures to videos, because video processing is more complicated than photo processing.

First of all, video than the size of the picture, watching, the user's traffic will be much more expensive. Each picture may be 1 to 2 trillion, and the video has 24 frames per second, each frame is a picture size, the video per minute will be nearly 100 trillion, but the love of the team can compress the video per minute to about 1 trillion.

Second, unlike the image, which has a common JPG pattern, different devices shoot video formats differently. Platform not only to deal with different video upload format, but also to convert the format to all types of terminals can accept the format. These difficulties hinder some entrepreneurs who want to expand from images to videos.

In order to serve the users more attentively, the cloud of love sinks saved the original video uploaded by the user. Now the vast majority of video social sharing sites on the server, save the Upload video processing version. If the user terminal, then the original file can not be found. At present, there are more than 1 million downloads for all terminals in love.

Cultural differences

In terms of product form, what Chinese startups do can find templates abroad. But the social application of acquaintances is somewhat different, it involves cultural differences, so it can not be copied. Just as foreigners like to greet with a hug, and the Chinese just smile, this is the cultural difference. Since the acquaintance social intercourse has done is the thing between the person, then it naturally has the regional culture difference.

The biggest difference is that Chinese acquaintances are more socially focused on the privacy of their products. On path, a friend can see all the information the user publishes. Time flow intimate to the user set a small lock button; In the love of the exchange, the user can be different for each video permissions settings, you can share the video to the target friends, but also can be canceled at any time to share, at the same time, the people are sharing can not download video; You can put the most intimate friends on the main account, some of the friends may not have to add the invitation to put on the deputy account.

"This is related to the Chinese implicit tradition, people do not want to disclose everything, want to say different things to different people." "said Zhao Liang, founder of the Love Exchange," explained.

Although there is a better understanding of local needs than foreign products, the entrepreneurs of acquaintances and social networking face serious challenges. Foreign capital markets are more mature, with a sound exit mechanism, and Google and Facebook will acquire some outstanding start-ups, but China's acquisition rate is relatively small. Most of the time, startups only listed this one of Huashan road. This road is very steep, the first is the life and death, only to do tens users to survive, and then "Tencent off", business will be big after the big attention, and how to survive under the impact?

The key to successful clearance is to grasp the user. This requires entrepreneurs to constantly upgrade their products, and constantly surprise users to maintain the user's stickiness and active degree. To better understand the habits of Chinese users, Mr. Zhao's team will be able to understand users ' needs through email, interviews, and more. This allows the team to get a lot of useful advice, and users will ask whether the shared notification can be more anthropomorphic when sharing it with others. Can you make some graffiti changes to your pictures to express how you feel when you see them?

At this stage, Tao is working with the platform to discuss cooperation, hoping to introduce more flow of time flow. Mr. Zhao and his team are working on a variety of offline "other models that are hard to imitate" to promote themselves. It's a time war. Now everyone has just started running, lagging behind will soon fall behind. Truly listed companies, still have 3-5 years.