When you think of social networking, chances are you think of MySpace or other sites aimed at broadcasting your personal information to the Web at large. But there's another side to social networking, a side best represented by a site that predates the MySpace craze: Multiply.com. Like MySpace or TagWorld, Multiply lets you build a personal Web presence, uploading everything from random thoughts to music, photos, and videos. Unlike its higher-profile cousins, however, Multiply.com gives you complete control over who can see each piece of information and who can't. First and foremost, it's a tool for communicating with friends, family, and colleagues—not with the Web at large.
The irony is that Multiply has been there all along. It launched in early 2005, and from the very beginning it focused on privately connecting people who already knew each other. In the year and half since Multiply's launch, MySpace (which, in its current iteration, dates back to 2003) has become one of the world's most popular sites. Many Internet startups have struggled to imitate MySpace, but Multiply has remained faithful to its own vision, and it's managed to attract over 2.3 million users doing so. That's a far cry from MySpace's 75 million, but it's a healthy user base nonetheless.—Continue reading
What's New: Features Have Multiplied Like Bunnies
When I first reviewed the site in January 2005, I quite liked it, but now it's even more impressive. The interface is more refined, and the pages created with the service tend to be much more attractive than those created with MySpace—where many users seem to take pride in their hideous pages. You can share videos and music as well as photos, blog entries, and online calendars. And just this week, the company removed all storage limits and subscription fees. Its revenue now comes solely from advertising and photo-printing (through a partnership with Club Photo, it lets you seamlessly order prints of uploaded photos).
Basically, Multiply gives you a personal Web site off the company domain—mine's at cademetz.multiply.com—where you can quickly post almost anything. On one section of your site, you can post a running blog. On another, you can upload photos. A third holds videos. And so on. Some upload tools are easier to use than others, but in the end, all get the job done with relatively little hassle.
I'm particularly impressed with the photo-sharing tools. When I first reviewed the service, I complained that you couldn't upload photos simply by dragging and dropping. Now, thanks to a new Java-based uploader, you can—and it works like a charm.
Of course, if your machine isn't running Java, you can't use this particular method, and the site doesn't give clear instructions on how to install Java (all it does it is point you to Java.com). When I tested the service, I'd just upgraded to a new laptop that wasn't running Java, so I had to visit Sun's site and download it.
On the plus side, Multiply does give you alternative photo uploaders: a simple HTML tool and an ActiveX control that actually displays the photos on your hard drive. The ActiveX control is as easy (or as difficult) to install as any other ActiveX Control. If you're running Internet Explorer 6, you're likely familiar with the yellow "information bar" that occasionally appears along the top of your browser. I didn't have any trouble clicking on my information bar, downloading the control, and then installing it, but greener users may not realize that's what they're supposed to do.
Unfortunately, the drag-and-drop metaphor hasn't been extended to other types of media beyond photos. You're forced to use simpler HTML tools, but these are at least all well designed and reasonably fast. When uploading music, for instance, you have to select one song at a time from your Microsoft Windows file tree, but once you've selected ten files, you can upload them all at once. You can upload only one video at a time, but since videos generally take so long to upload, that's not much of a worry.
The beauty of these tools—and, of course, the driving force behind Multiply—is that, each time you upload something, it's easy to specify who will have access to it. If you like, you can make a photo available to the general public, MySpace-style. Or you can limit access to certain e-mail addresses.
No, you don't have to key in the same e-mail addresses every time you want to give access to a new upload. Multiply lets you keep a master list of contacts, and, if you like, you can expose new files to that list with just a mouse click. You can also create smaller subgroups of friends or family and serve up files to them in much the same way. In order to view your content, your friends will have to join Multiply, but that's easy to do (and free).
As you post new photos, videos, or music files, you can send notifications to friends and family. And as groups trade files, blogs, and more, they can leave comments for each other, building running discussions. It is a lot like MySpace, but almost from beginning to end, Multiply is much more refined. It gives you more control over what you post and who has access to it, and ultimately, individual pages are far more attractive. The very open, free-form world of MySpace has its charms, but for those of us concerned with keeping a tighter rein on our online personas, so does the more contained world of Multiply.
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