LINE BAND is LINE‘s answer to Path, and despite only arriving this February it already boasts more users at 15 million, compared to Path’s ten. LINE BAND is a social network designed to help you organize your social life.
With LINE BAND you organize your friends and family into ‘bands’. You invite contacts to these bands, and join others. While on Facebook you communicate with all your contacts by default; with LINE BAND, you communicate with defined groups. This means it’s much more simple to have conversations between just your family, for example.
Every Band has its own Timeline where members can share stories and photos, you can host polls to make decisions between the members, and they each have a schedule. You can even have a different nickname in different bands, which again feels much closer to how real life works than Facebook. My family call me Jonathan, and my friends call me Jon; but no one calls me Jonathan Riggall except Facebook.
One feature of the mobile app that is very interesting, security wise is an optional Passcode Lock. You can choose to require a code every time you start the app, giving you an extra layer of privacy.
While it has similarities with Path, LINE BAND actually feels more immediate. Your first moments with Path can be confusing, while LINE BAND is very well explained and easy to get into.
LINE BAND is available on Android and iOS, and a desktop version is coming soon.
