Mobile Could Be What Makes Private Social Networks Succeed Photos, location, professional networking, or all your real-life friends… Instagram, Foursquare, LinkedIn and Facebook lead social networking today because they’ve found existing the types of networks to connect users around. Now a new generation of startups has been showing up in recent months, trying to nail another type of networking that so far has yielded no big success: small, very personal networks. Like you how use texts with your closest friends. These companies are looking pretty healthy — almost too healthy, if you look at some of their valuations versus their user numbers — and it’s because of how they’re using mobile. Path is the market leader here, even if the overall market is small today. Having relaunched last fall as mobile-only network for close friends that provides a cool spinny menu feature for actions like photos and check-ins, the company has shown enough progress that it was able to raise $30 million a...
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