The skinny on Indonesia’s love affair with Path

This afternoon at Startup Asia Jakarta 2014, Path’s Marketing Manager Ana LaRue shared some information regarding the company’s operations in Indonesia.

In addition to Path’s previously revealed plans to hire a country manager for the Indonesia region, they confirmed today that they have plans to set up an office here. LaRue also said that the main responsibilities of the country manager will involve working with local designers to create stickers for the social network and involve local brands.

But LaRue says that Path’s main focus here in Indonesia will be for research. The company is currently working with a select group of early adopters dubbed “The Path 50,” who test out new features and provides regular feedback. LaRue noted that a majority of Path’s users keep about 40 friends on their list, but that’s not the case in Indonesia.

Previously Path only allowed users a maximum of 150 friends, but this number has since increased to 500. LaRue states that the reason for the increase was to please consumers based on feedback, which is somewhat contrary to her previous statement on the number of friends that most users keep.

See: How GrabTaxi is using local bylanes to stay ahead of Uber in Southeast AsiaAulia Masna, who conducted the interview, noted that in the past, Path used to publish interaction data that clearly identified how Path was being used. LaRue stated that the main reason they stopped publishing that data was due to privacy concerns. “We don’t want to share that data, we’re very focused on privacy of our users,” she said.

LaRue also discussed the launch of the spin-off chat application named Path Talk, which the company hopes will disrupt the crowded market of messaging applications. Masna asked if the app could be considered in line with the trend wherein US-based social apps like Facebook unbundle popular features into new apps. LaRue said unbundling is occurring in Asia too, and that the standalone Path Talk app helps Path users do their messaging without opening up the flagship app. She also said the company is pursuing avenues in Path Talk that will let brands interact with consumers.

This is part of the coverage of Startup Asia Jakarta 2014, our event running on November 26 and 27. Check out all the Startup Arena pitches here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia and on our Facebook page.