Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus.
In our Social betworking
faceoff post we did not cover Multiply.com, but
afterwards we were contacted by the Multiply team and asked to take a look at their
technology. We found it unique and interesting, so we are bringing you this analysis
post. Multiply has recently experienced substantial growth and now has 3M registered
users. The service has been around for quite some time and its core is family
and friends networks. But unlike many social networks, particularly MySpace, in
Multiply the focus is on how individuals consume information in the social
network. Other places focus on socializing first and foremost.
I spoke this morning with Multiply's president and founder, Peter Pezaris, and was quite impressed with Multiply's approach. At first glance, the site is not that different from other sharing sites, but after a careful look it is clear that Multiply has developed some unique and interesting technology that is not available elsewhere. Like many other sites, Multiply has blogs, pictures, video, music, calendar and link sharing capabilities. These features appear on the user profile page, like this one, where other users can look and comment on them. But Multiply also offers a fundamentally different way of consuming personalized information.
All relationships within Multiply network are of a certain type. For example, friends links are different from family links - and even immediate family links like parent and sibling are different from aunt and niece. Multiply utilizes information about relationship types to compute a proximity score between two individuals. Think of the proximity score as a kind of Google page rank, because it allows Multiply to rank the relevance of the content. For example, when another Multiply user posts a picture or a blog entry - the algorithm computes how relevant this piece of information is to you.
All new items that Multiply computes as relevant to you are shown under the Explore tab. When I saw this, I immediately thought of a term that I have been thinking about for sometime: 'a feed for you'. This is an aggregated, dynamic and highly personalized view of news, events, photos, videos and music from all members of your network. The best part is that Multiply computes this automatically, without you doing any work.
I also noticed that the personalized view of activity within your network has some interesting options. For example, you can choose to see more or less content by tweaking the relevancy knob. You can also organize the information by activity or freshness, as well as select to see only particular types of information - like photos or blog entries. The user interface is also smart about understanding what you do not want. For example if you have not replied to a post, it will go away after a certain amount of time. Little things like that make a lot of difference in user experience.
I think the privacy + personalization + automation angle here is clearly a winner. It does not guarantee, however, that people will get it or will choose the site because of this angle. As we know, there are many factors that go into a decision to pick one social network over another. Perhaps adding more flare and features to the site would help the adoption, but the current focus is certainly the key differentiator.
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Multiply: A Different Approach To Social Networking.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2807
For those busy souls who don't have time to read blogs on a regular basis, here are the highlights from Read/WriteWeb this week. It turned out to be a Social Networking special, with a lot of our posts devoted to... Read More
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus. A pure TechCrunch goodness has descended on New York on this rainy evening. Ignoring the rain, hundreds of web 2.0 fans, venture capitalists and sponsors rushed to the sought after New... Read More
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all Read/WriteWeb posts
The Explore feed is intriguing - like a nuanced version of much aligned Facebook feed. Now, what would *really* make a killer-app out of it is having positive feedback. When I do look at a low-ranked item in my feed, it should automatically bump it up, or even have an Amazon-like recommendation engine.
Posted by: The Rub | October 6, 2006 4:00 PMThats a really good idea, I will pass it along to the Multiply folks.
Alex
Posted by: Alex Iskold | October 6, 2006 4:41 PMAs you can see from my URL, I have a Multiply site.
One of the features not mentioned that is unique to Multiply is the recording by the site of who has viewed any particular page/feature of one's site, listing their username, if they are connected to me (such as "Your son" when my son stops by to check out the latest photos I've posted or to read my newest blog, or simply the user name for those not in my network). One can then click on that user's name and go to their profile/page. It tells you when that person viewed that page on your site also.
Another feature is the ability to send out notices via the site's Explore page system to those in one's network and, if one chooses, send out e-mails via the system to chosen people for any new item one posts, to one or two many people, even someone who is not a member of the site. This is nice to keep people up to date on new content on one's site, or to invite only one person if what you've posted, such as the photos of your weekend trip so they can download the photos they may have missed taking.
All in all, though I have several sites online I try to keep up to date, sometimes with the same content on more than one, I like Multiply the best, for all these personalized features.
By the way, they have just made some new features available, among which (though I haven't tested it) is the ability to post to one's site via e-mail, even from one's phone.
Oh, and their customer service is exceptional! I send an e-mail contact to them and within relatively quickly I get a personalized response AND it shows on my "View History" page that "service" has viewed my page.
Check it out!
Posted by: Janet | October 20, 2006 9:53 PMJust to complement Janet's comment:
What makes Multiply different is that while other network sites are focused on people, Multiply has space for their ideas. That means that you may use it for more than only networking: you can use it to build your own site based on a subject you like but your personal life - and it can be accessed by anyone in internet, if you want so.
It is also very good on the personalized formatting of each blog, what permits every user to be unique. My site, for example, is unique by its address, lay-out and subject (which is, by the way, Brazilian Literature, History and Arts).
Here in Brazil My Space is not very welcome because of the many spams that it brings. Orkut is THE popular network site - almost as popular as a common telefone call - but it does not compete with Multiply because while Orkut is person-relationship focused, Multiply is idea-sharing focused - it means its members are generaly more mature and have broad interests and points-of-view.
I love it!
Posted by: Aline | October 26, 2006 6:13 AMHiii..Multiply.!!
Posted by: vishnu | November 3, 2006 7:03 AMThis website gave me very good operchunity 2 me. But there is no security 2 the method of creating web. CAN Multiply provide such security??(to hide the method of creating it.)