Multiply, a small but sophisticated social networking service with one of the most loyal userbases on the web, unvieled a long list of new features this afternoon. It might be because it's Friday night here in the US, but I'm feeling a little crazy. Since there's some healthy Facebook backlash developing, since social networking is not a one-size fits all phenomenon (demands for data standards excepted), and since Multiply's new features look so much like Facebook - it seems a good time to compare the two services. Facebook is a great place to go if you want to find a lot of people, particularly college educated people. There is a world of social networking beyond it, however.
Multiply has always had impressively flexible privacy controls; today it added greater precision over privacy, audio and video commenting, media import from other sites and more.
Facebook made headlines with its Platform and is now worth more than most remaining US automobile companies, but Multiply is no fly-by-night operation, either. Remember when the news came out that despite all the blog love, Flickr was actually smaller than the unheard-of at the time Photobucket? Multiply may be small by major social network standards (the site's front page says "Our 7 million members upload more than 1,500,000 photos and 16,000 videos every day") but it would be a mistake for market watchers to ignore it. Multiply users love the company, too- Multiply doesn't appear to anger their users like so many of its competitors do.
If you're interested in a good solid, state of the art but still easy to use social networking site, these new features at Multiply make it a very compelling offering. Does it stand a chance at survival in the face of other services' near total domination of the social networking market? Yes, there are 6 billion people in the world and I would not bet against a service as solid as this one.
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