social networks | the first casualty.

Middling social network Path has come up with a nifty new feature that should have been included in all social media platforms for years — the ability to search through your past:

Mobile social network Path broke down social network walls in the summer of 2012 by giving new users the option to import their Facebook, Foursquare and Instagram data.

Now, Path is playing up that feature as the best way to cull all your social updates (minus those from Twitter) into one big archive. Starting Thursday, that archive is searchable, making for a very unique and handy way to recall your memories. “We want people to basically use us as their social search engine,” says Path marketing director Nate Johnson. “Our goal is simple, to help people be close to each other.”

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With Nearby and search, you can find anything you’ve shared to Path and Facebook, Instagram and Foursquare (assuming you’ve imported that data). That gives Path a huge leg up, because you can’t search for any past activity on those social networks.

Why this isn’t already the case on Facebook is a question I’ve wondered for a long, long time. Kudos to someone else for actually making it happen.

Admit it: you thought Google+ was basically dead. (I know I did.) Turns out, the social network is very much alive and healthy:

Google today announced that it has 135 million active users checking their Google+ streams each month, up from 100 million in mid-September. If you run the math, that means Google+ is now growing at the same pace as Facebook when it was similarly sized.

Google announced the user growth alongside a new feature called “Google+ Communities” and enhancements to Google’s mobile photo app Snapseed. Its last user count update was on Sept. 17, meaning Google+ has added 35 million stream-active users in the past 2.5 months.

That means that every month Google+ is adding about 14 million stream-active users, the type of users most comparable to those on Facebook. As it happens, Facebook added monthly active users at almost the exact same pace between late August 2008, when it reached 100 million active users, and early April 2009, when it hit 200 million active users. That seven-month spurt resulted in growth of of 14.3 million users per month.