In mobile design, failure is inevitable, says Path's Dave Morin
Dave Morin, the chief executive of the private mobile social network app Path, was onstage at MobileBeat 2012 this morning with Michael Copeland, the senior editor of Wired. And Morin, true to form, was full of great one-liners.
Context & Ripple Effects
Path enters MobileBeat 2012 on a split narrative. The company rebuilt itself after its December 2010 integration with Facebook and posted 30x daily-user growth following its relaunch, then raised about $20 million at a $250 million pre-money valuation from Redpoint Ventures in March 2012. But the same quarter brought the low point: Path was found to have uploaded iPhone users' entire address books without permission, prompting public anger by February and a class-action suit naming Path alongside Twitter, Apple, and Facebook.
So when Morin told Wired's Michael Copeland onstage that failure is inevitable in mobile design, the line carried more weight than a conference aphorism — he was reframing his own company's contact-data privacy breach as an instance of a universal condition rather than a one-off lapse. The syndication across GigaOM, The Equity Kicker, and Social Markets suggests the framing resonated well beyond the room.
First-order effects
- Morin's remarks give Path a ready-made narrative for its privacy stumble — iterate fast, fail fast, fix fast — consistent with the hashing and anonymization of contact data it began after the breach surfaced.
Second-order effects
- The 'failure is inevitable' framing runs directly into the pending lawsuit by thirteen individuals against more than a dozen app makers over automatic address book uploads, where courts will not accept inevitability as a defense — pushing every named developer toward visible privacy remediation.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, mobile social apps face a structural collision between ship-and-iterate design culture and rising legal accountability for data collection, making privacy handling a designed-in requirement rather than a post-launch patch.
The trend: Mobile social networking is entering a phase where the fail-fast design ethos must coexist with hardening legal and public expectations around user data.