Path today announced the launch of Talk, a new standalone messaging app for iOS (coming later today) and Android, and the acquisition of “place messaging” service TalkTo.
The company has also backed off from its exclusivity angle by removing the friend limit from its main app. When the app first launched in 2010, it was designed as a journal for your closest friends, so you could only have 50 friends. Eventually, Path increased the limit to 150 friends. Now, you social butterflies can have as many Path friends as you darn well please.
The move to messaging explains how quiet Path has been this past year – the main Path app hasn’t seen many updates. The company laid the groundwork for Talk earlier this month when it began offering an ephemeral 24-hour messaging option for private messages.
Talk also includes an ambient status feature, which keeps track of when you and your friends are on the move, are nearby or have low battery. In addition to text, the app lets you send music, maps, movies, books, audio and video. And, of course, Talk includes stickers, which first came to Path last year.
Path said in its announcement post that the vision behind the new app is to create a “personal way to way to communicate with everything in your life.” But what does that even mean? For Path, it means messaging places and things, not just people. That’s where TalkTo comes in.
TalkTo works by hiring Agents to answer questions about specific places. The company’s employees will call businesses, wait on hold, find out the answer and then message you back with the info. Path plans to have TalkTo’s service fully integrated into Path Talk by the end of this summer.
With Path largely quiet in recent months, questions had been raised about the company’s future. The messaging space is very hot right now, so Talk sets the startup on a new…path toward success.
➤ Path Talk | App Store [coming soon] | Google Play
Image credit: jamesdavidphoto / Shutterstock
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