For regular guys like me, Multiply is it. For discussion between real-world friends and family around your personal media, there is no better solution than Multiply. by Peter Pezaris, President and CEO

For the exhibitionists of the world, there is no shortage of web sites that can distribute your content to a wider audience of strangers: MySpace, YouTube, Flickr to name a few. For regular guys like me, however, we care more about sharing our personal media with people we actually know in real life.

MySpace offers very crude privacy controls which are unsuitable for exchanging personal media in all but the most basic use case scenarios. Your entire profile on MySpace is either set completely public so that anyone in the world can see it, or completely private, so only your direct contacts can see it. You have one switch to throw, and it's either ON or OFF.

On Multiply, everything you add to the site — and I do mean everything — has individual fine-grained privacy controls. On Monday I can take a photo of the Empire State Building and post it to my Multiply profile for the whole world to see. On Tuesday I can write a blog entry about politics and make it available to my extended circle of friends, and friends-of-friends (through trusted, bi-directionally confirmed relationships). On Wednesday I can take a video of my kids in the bathtub and make it available for only my Mom, my sister and my wife.

Facebook offers better privacy controls than MySpace, but they are still crude. The world is still binary: either someone is your contact or not. There is no way to share your media with your co-worker's wife, your Mom's best friend, or your sister's roommate without first making them a contact of yours. This artificial pressure to add contacts degrades the quality and accuracy of your personal "social graph" over time; anyone who has used Facebook or LinkedIn has seen these effects.

Multiply allows you to meaningfully and appropriately communicate with tier-2 and tier-3 contacts based on our proprietary system which ranks users in order of how close they are to you in your real-world social graph (this is similar to how Google's PageRank works, only applied to social networks). This recognition that friends-of-friends are important to you for the exchange of personal media is how we keep our representation of your real-world social circles more accurate.

Multiply's proprietary messaging system, which alerts your personal network not only when new content is posted, but also when replies are added to those posts, is sometimes compared to Facebook's news feed. Facebook's news feed is a snapshot of web-site activity containing such crucial nuggets as "Debbie vampire bit Julie," "Dave added the superpoke application" to be followed closely by "Dave removed the superpoke application." Importantly, this activity stream is not a communication tool; it fails miserably at that. The insanely low signal to noise ratio is one important aspect of this shortcoming, but perhaps the fatal flaw is that there is no "page 2." That means you can only see the last 15 items of activity, and can never go back in time before that.

Imagine if your email INBOX contained only the last 15 emails that people have sent you, and when you receive the 16th, the first one — poof — is gone for good and there's no way to get it back. That is exactly how Facebook's news feed works. Some people have referred to it as drive-by social spamming, but whatever it is, it's not suitable for meaningful communication around personal media.

Contrast this to Multiply, where you have an Inbox that combines all of the media sharing and communication that happens within your personal network in one place. When your sister's roommate posts a new photo album, it shows up in your Inbox (if she has granted access that far). When you get a personal message, it shows up in your Inbox. When someone replies to one of your videos it's also in your Inbox. Importantly, you can filter this message-board like application to show you only those items you are interested in, and you can go back in time as far back as you want... want to see all the videos that have been posted by contacts of yours? No problem. Want to see all the replies to posts you made that you haven't read yet? Click click done. Want to see everything that's being discussed in your extended network of friends-of-friends, including notification where the ongoing real-time discussions are? That's where Multiply adds real value. And each one of these settings is but a couple of clicks away, and saveable in a personal/private RSS feed, unique to you.

Most importantly, however, when you take that precious video of your daughter's first steps, when you share it on Multiply you're guaranteed that your Mom will see it, because it won't be pushed off the front page of her newsfeed (and into oblivion) when someone she didn't know got "top friended" by someone else she didn't know. On Multiply, not only is there a page 2 so she'll see it, we even keep track of when she does so you know for sure.

Simply put, Multiply delivers next-generation technology to make lives easier, more engaging, and more fun for those like me who want to share our lives and communicate with people we actually know. We'll let our competitors focus on social gaming, social flirting, and social hangouts.

Four years ago we had a vision to deliver the best personal media sharing site in the world to as many people as possible, in the hopes that it would bring family and friends together. Since our launch in 2004 we have focused on nothing else. The end result is a product suite geared specifically for one purpose: for those more interested in meaningful discussion between real-world friends and family around their personal media, there is no better solution than Multiply.

• If you're a semi-pro photographer, Flickr is the site for you.
• Are you an exhibitionist? Try MySpace.
• YouTube is the best place to post your viral video if you don't care who sees it.
• Facebook is the hands-down winner in social gaming and profile toys.

Do you have friends and family that you care about and would like to have a better way to stay in touch with, and share those precious photos and videos, and discuss current events?

Multiply is it.

Ironing Out the Wrinkles: Multiply is for everyone
by Michael Gersh, VP of Sales and Marketing

As most of our users know, Multiply recently received an investment and that news led to some nice press coverage. Some of this coverage has attempted to categorize Multiply as a website for particular age groups. For example, in an article entitled New Social Sites Cater to People of a Certain Age the NY Times grouped us with a few sites that "look like Facebook - with wrinkles" and that we're seeking out "older Internet users."  Another example, which actually contradicts the first, comes from Venturebeat, who writes that Multiply is a "social network aimed at 30-somethings."

We’re certainly happy that these stories covered our funding announcement, but those categorizations are not accurate. Multiply does not target specific age groups at all. In fact, we try hard to make sure the site is age-neutral, as well as gender- and geography-neutral. You can see what I mean by simply comparing our home page to others. Below are portions of screen grabs taken a few days ago (9/19), from the home pages of two other "social networking" sites:

Just by looking at the images, you can instantly determine who these sites are targeting. These are extreme examples of age targeting, however there are other social networking sites that similarly present random head-shots of actual users on their home page, and this can have a similar result in determining who uses those sites. Regardless of whom the site’s features may appeal to, if its userbase grows unevenly (across age or demographic), the random headshots on the home-page will increasingly represent the majority groups, and, in turn, will attract more users from those majority groups while potentially turning off others.

Since Multiply isn't for any specific age group, you won’t see photos of users on our homepage, much less users with "wrinkles." Our message to potential users: when you use Multiply, you’ll only see people – and content – relevant to you based on your real-life relationships – and that is appealing to people of any age.

I understand that journalists want to be able to differentiate the products and companies they write about, but the best way to differentiate Multiply is by the goals it allows users to achieve, in comparison with other sites. For example, both Multiply and YouTube let registered users upload video. But Multiply does not have a page that lets unregistered users view the "Most Viewed" or "Top Rated" videos. And YouTube doesn't have a page that lets a user know when her brother's roommate added a reply to that brother’s video. So if  someone’s goal is to have his video viewed (and commented on) by as many strangers as possible in the whole world, YouTube is probably the way to go. If the goal is sharing and discussing with people you care about, check out Multiply.

Multiply wants to provide users with a powerful communications tool that offers advantages over other communication tools, such as e-mail. For instance, on Multiply you can share media such as photos and videos more elegantly than you can with e-mail. And Multiply lets you share with more of the people you care about - or who care about you. (With e-mail, my sister's friends would never see the pictures I post. With Multiply, and only Multiply, they will – with no extra effort on my part.)

I'm not suggesting that our product has equal appeal across age groups. Younger people, on average, are more comfortable doing things like transferring video from a camera to a web-site than older people are. Younger people are also more likely to want to search through as many random profiles as they can, making new "friends" on-line, and flirting the night away. Knowing that, it makes sense that our product is very appealing to people in their thirties. But that doesn't mean Multiply is meant for people in their thirties. We've got plenty of users younger and older than that, and in ten years, the site will still be useful for all our current users even though they'll be ten years older. The same can't be said for most other social networking sites.

To summarize, I'd like to share a reply added by a Multiply user to  a post on Techcrunch that encapsulates much of what I've just written very succinctly:

I’m not looking for a site that’s going to try to force someone else’s agenda for my age group on me. I want a social site that works and works well. I want a site that’s going to enable me to get my own content out to exactly the people I want it to go out to. And I only want to have to deal with content coming in that I’ve chosen to see. It’s not about the age of the users but the functionality of the site.