Andrew Hinton describing Path’s failure as a UX failure:
This is in part what some of us in the community are calling the failure of “user experience design” culturally: UX has largely become a buzzword for the first list, in the rush to crank out hip, interactively interesting software. But “business rules” which effectively act as the architecture of the platform are driven almost entirely by business concerns; content is mostly overlooked for any functional purposes beyond giving a fun, hip tone to the brand of the platform; and interaction design is mainly being driven by designers more concerned with “taste” performance and “innovative” UI than creating a rigorously considered, coherent experience.
The whole piece is definitely worth a read. Apart from the insights into interaction design “lenses,” the “Huh? Wait a moment…” description of how he understood what was happening is enlightening.