Have you been enjoying Multiply's new Audio/Video Reply feature?

If you answered no, could it possibly be because you haven't tried it yet? And if you indeed haven't tried it yet, could it perhaps be that you don't have a webcam from which to leave a video comment? That's terrible!

If so, there's no need to be sad; we have just the solution for pulling yourself out of your webcam-less funk – to celebrate our new Audio/Video Reply feature, Multiply is giving away ten Logitech QuickCam Messengers!


If you'd like to win one, here's what you've got to do:

1. Ask a friend of yours who already owns a webcam to come to this blog entry and nominate you by leaving a video comment. (Perhaps send them a Personal Message? Maybe post a blog entry asking all of your contacts?)
   
2. If their video comment is among those randomly selected, you win your own webcam!
3. (There is no step three!)
   

Increase your chances of winning a camera by getting more people to nominate you!
To make this easier, perhaps paste the following HTML code to easily get your friends here:



If you'd like to help a friend win one, just:

1. Post a video reply to this blog entry nominating them.
   
2. In this video, make sure to hold up a piece of paper with the user ID of the user you're nominating. (Remember their user ID is the first part of their site's URL: http://userID.multiply.com/. Also, make sure the user ID appears clearly in the video; we need to be able to read it. :-)
   
3. If your nomination video is the one selected, they win a webcam... and you get a Multiply t-shirt!
   
4. (There is no step four!)
   

Each user is only allowed to nominate one other user, though you're free to get as many people as possible to nominate you. So if you're nominating someone, make sure to pick your favorite friend! ;-)

The contest runs for two weeks (from now until 11:59 PM ET on 12/26; see this in your time zone), so don't wait!

See the first comment below for an example contest entry!


For the official rules, click here.

We've recently shown you a few sneak previews on this very blog. Today, however, we bring you something a little different.

(Not previews, but actual features!)
(Not coming soon, but actually here! Now!)

We think you've waited long enough.
So now, with absolutely no further ado, here are some great new features, packed with extra goodness:

A/V

Audio/Video Replies  This new feature lets you post audio and video replies directly from your microphone or webcam, to more easily share your life with your friends. If you already own a webcam, you should definitely try out this feature as soon as possible. Seriously. There will be a test. :-)

Webcam Video Posting  It's not just for replies anymore! Easily create new video posts directly from your webcam – it's as easy as clicking "Post" and selecting "Video."

Enhanced Flash Video Player  We've made some pretty nice changes to the video player. One thing you may want to try is the little eject button in the bottom-right corner... click it to show other videos from that user.

Alerts

Easy Alert Management  Remember how easy it used to be to manage your e-mail alerts? (Please, don't answer that!) You'll be pleased to hear that it's now really, really easy to do so right here. (This is also accessible through My E-mail Alerts on your settings page.)

Better What You've Missed Subjects  'What You've Missed' alerts now contain extra information about what you've missed (and from whom you've missed it), right in the subject line.

Preset Inbox Filters  While you can still create your own filters, we've automatically added a few new ones that are sure to be helpful, including Unread posts from your Contacts, Subscribed and Personal Messages.

Imports

All-Import Page  We've created a new page listing all of our import tools, for all content types, all in one easy-to-use place!

New Contact Imports  Have friends on Shutterfly or Kodak Gallery? You now have the option of inviting them to Multiply while you import your photos!

Navigation

New Navigation Links  See those tabs at the top of any page, including the brand-new Inbox? They're sure to make navigating Multiply even easier!

Inbox Toolbox  Along the right side of your Inbox, you'll find a new "Tools" box, which brings together links to a few of our favorite features, like the Multiply Toolbar and Imports page.

Let's not forget...

Default Access Setting  If you'd like to make absolutely sure you never share anything with a wider audience than you'd intend, this is the feature for you. (Set this up under Posting Options on your settings page.) Remember, this works for all new posts going forward — even posts you import from other services — though it won't change anything that was previously posted to Multiply.

Headshot Mouse-overs  We've made these a little less easy to mistakenly activate. Now, in order to view a user's mini-profile, just click their mini-headshot, wherever it appears on Multiply.

Recipes and Marketplace  Surprise: they're ba-aaack! (If you'd like to enable these content types for your account, you can do so under Posting Options on your settings page.)

Please enjoy these new features, and be sure to let us know (perhaps with video?) what you think of them!

A recently released feature that probably hasn't received the recognition it deserves is the aptly-titled Allow viewers to download original video file option.

This is not for want of trying, as we did announce it... but admittedly also sort of buried it at the bottom of an entry announcing a much bigger, more exciting, ultimately overshadowing feature. And to think, we announced it without even so much as a screenshot!

So, in case you're curious — or have never seen it — here's what it looks like:


The option appears just after posting a new video, or when editing an existing one. Keep it checked to allow download, or uncheck it to disable it – it's that simple. Either way, you (the poster) will still be able to download the original file, when available.

This is enabled via the Advanced Posting option... so if you already have enabled it in the past, you're ready to start using it. (Wondering what other features are enabled by Advanced Posting? Have a look at this blog's brand-new Advanced Posting tag!)

Sorry for all the suspense, but tag users... it's time to rejoice, at least a little bit, because we've got something that even the most emo tag user can be happy about -- a great new way to display your tagged posts. And if you haven't been tagging your posts, here's the perfect reason to get started.

Customizable tag boxes
If you use the "Boxes" homepage layout (as opposed to "Linear"), you can now create new boxes on your homepage that display content based on the tags you've given them.

That's right, in addition to the usual boxes like "Photos" and "Videos," you can now mix and match tags to your heart's content... and display your creations on your Multiply homepage. If you ever wished for a box displaying your latest posts related to, say, business, pirates and trees, this feature makes your wish come true.

To set this up, just click the familiar "Customize Site" link on your homepage, and follow this with the aptly-titled "Add Tagged Content Box" link. You'll get a pop-up that you can use to set the options for your box -- particularly what should be displayed (pick one or more tags), and how it should be displayed (box title, number of entries to display). Once you've created your box, you can manipulate it like any other content type box: drag it around, hide it, edit it... And here's the best part: you can make multiple tag boxes!

Customizable tag clouds
We've also added a new option for the way you display tags on your homepage. Rather than displaying your entire tag cloud at the end of your Welcome Message, you can now save space by choosing to only display a limited number of tags. And if you're the administrator of a group, you now have this setting available to you within your group!

Also customizable: original video download setting
On a completely different note, we've had a number of users ask for a way to disable the "Download Original" links for videos they've posted, as you can with photos. Starting now, this is possible. Make sure you've enabled Advanced Posting for your account, and you'll find this option whenever uploading a video, or editing one already uploaded.


So, how are you planning on using these new features? Do you already have custom boxes in mind? Are you planning on going the more extreme route, completely replacing your normal boxes with custom tag boxes?

Here's a bundle of brand-new features that should make all users, both new and old (and future) alike, quite happy.

First, for the current users:
(because you're awesome)

More customization of your message board
Ever wanted to hide some of those boxes next to your message board? If you haven't, we don't blame you, because they're great. But in case you want to try something new, now you can! Just click "Preferences" on the message board page and pick the boxes you'd like to hide.

Easy image embedding elsewhere
In case you happen to find yourself on a website that isn't Multiply (why, we're not sure) and would like to share an image stored on Multiply with the unenlightened masses out there, we've made it easier to do so. Just go to the page of the particular photo you'd like to use (i.e. visit album where it's stored and click the appropriate thumbnail) and click that sweet new "share" link below. Then grab the HTML, conveniently located below, paste it into the other site and share it!

No auto-loading for non-new videos
We've changed the way the Flash video player works for repeat viewings. Now, when you view a video for the first time -- and only the first time -- it will automatically begin loading in the background, for quick playback when you press play. (Note that it won't auto-play. That's just annoying.) On subsequent viewings, it'll wait patiently for you to press play, which you're not likely to do anyway, as you're probably just there to view the new comments.

And for those who aren't users yet:
(because you're future-awesome)

Find your friends before you join
If you're on the fence about joining Multiply, or are just wondering if any of your friends have joined yet (and forgotten to tell or invite you), you can now check by clicking "Find friends" right on multiply.com. Either give us a few e-mail addresses you'd like to check, or import your entire contact list from a webmail account for full-coverage.

(This isn't just for new users, either! Current users who want to find their friends will find a link to this at the top of the search page.)

And, of course, for everyone:

A brand new look!
...and you've probably already noticed this. If you haven't, that's alright too.

Certain parts of Multiply are sporting a sleek new look. It's not a completely radical change, more a bit of a visual refresh. The new beauty, however, is more than skin-deep. Some may even call it functional. See if you can tell what's new!

So please, enjoy these new features.
Feedback, as always... you know we love it. :)

Want to hear a joke?
Ok, ready?
...

Dot-com ads during televised professional football championships.

...
No, not so funny anymore? It's clear that the days of charismatic canine sock puppets and excessive spending on TV ads during major sporting events, at least for web startups, are long gone.

Click Walter to watch 'em all!

And good riddance to them! We know as well as anybody that it's possible to reach a huge audience for next to nothing. As it turns out, there's this place called "The Internet." And on it, there's this web site called "Multiply" where you can share... ah, you know the rest.

So anyway, we set out to prove that great ads don't have to cost millions of dollars, feature celebrities, or have... adequate production values... to be funny. Or memorable. Or most of all, effective. And we've teamed up with a few other dot-com companies (Plaxo, Technorati, meebo, RockYou and Meez, to be precise) who've done the same to say to the world, once and for all... use our services!

At least we think that's what Walter, our lead quality assurance engineer, was saying in our ad. Have a look at it for a laugh -- and perhaps a cringe or two.

The other companies produced some great videos as well; be sure to watch 'em all and check out some of the other services featured. Rate the videos on YouTube. Then come on back to Multiply, because we'll miss you if you're gone too long.

So yes, viva Web 2.0, and all that.
And we'll be keeping our $2.6 million, thanks. :)

And now (only a little late, sorry), here are a couple more I Love Multiply videos to which we were quite partial:

This is Andrew's:



And this is Dre's:

Once again, we'd like to thank everyone who posted videos!

As promised, here's another I Love Multiply video!

This one was Terry's entry.

Astute readers will remember last month's I Love Multiply video contest. After the contest ended, the winners' addresses were collected, and the t-shirts and cameras (the grand-prizes) were sent out shortly thereafter.

We never showed you who won the cameras, though. They were selected randomly from the all of the videos entered, but we're definitely still fans.

Here they are:

This is Russel's entry:


This is Jody's (and Shaggy's) video:

Unfortunately, the third grand-prize winner has since deleted his entry. This brings a tear to each of our sad, sad eyes.

But don't despair! Next week, we'll be bringing you some other videos that were submitted. Keep an eye out for these.

We're pretty sure you already love Multiply, and now that we've made sharing your videos about as easy as pie, you're probably looking for every excuse you can find to make and post new videos to Multiply.

So we'll give you another one.
We're thrilled to announce the

I LOVE MULTIPLY

VIDEO CONTEST

We'll assume for a minute that you, in fact, do love Multiply.
Consistent with that, we'd love to hear why!
(And yes, in the form of a short video would be great.)

It's easy:

Step 1: Check to see if your digital camera or cell-phone can take video. (If you're not sure, contact us and we'll try to help you figure it out.) If it doesn't grab a friend's so you can win one that does!

Step 2: Shoot a video of yourself telling everybody why you love Multiply. Be funny. Be serious. Be honest. Or, heck... you can even lie if you want. But make sure your video is between 15 and 60 seconds in length.

Step 3: Upload the video to your Multiply site; making sure to tag it "I Love Multiply" (without the quotes, please). Also, make sure it's posted with "Everyone" access, so we (and everyone else) can see it!

Step 4: Tell your friends to submit their videos. (Yeah, this isn't a requirement, but it'll definitely make things more fun.)

That's it! To get things going, the first 25 people to upload a suitable video will receive a Multiply t-shirt. They're great (even we wear them!), but they're not the real prize.

Three lucky Grand Prize winners will be chosen at random to receive brand spanking new Casio Exilim digital cameras.

They take photos. And videos. And Multiply just so happens to be the perfect place to share both -- and the rest of your digital creations!

So just remember -- tag your videos I Love Multiply and share them with the world!

---

Sorry, the contest is only open to U.S. residents, but everyone should feel free to post their videos... we'd still like to see them! For the full rules and conditions our lawyers make us include, click here.

You may have noticed that we just rolled out some new features for Multiply. We hinted at some of these a few days ago, but now they're all finally ready.

We'll touch on each pretty briefly; there's a lot that's new and worth mentioning.

Flash video. Now when you share video on Multiply, we'll automatically convert it to Flash format, for easy viewing in your browser. You'll be able to download the original, and yes, embed these into other websites... just click "share." (We took a closer look at Flash video the other day; be sure to have a look!)

More imports. You can now import video content from YouTube, Google Video, and Photobucket. We've added ImageShack support to our growing list of image import tools. And if you blog on TypePad, you can now easily import your blog entries to Multiply.

Cross-posting. Blog imports are one thing... and are quite useful for catching up. But more excitingly, you can now blog concurrently with your LiveJournal, Blogger, or yes, TypePad account. Compose once and it's posted twice. (Enable each of these on the import pages for each respective service.)

Backdating. Many users have asked for the ability to have blog entries reflect a time and date other than the time they're posted. This new option will appear on your blog compose page once you've enabled Advanced Posting.

Revamped search. All the search tools you need -- whether you're looking for people, groups or content -- are now in one simple place.

Drag-and-drop your layout. If you use the "Boxes" layout type (as opposed to "Linear") for your Multiply page, you can now easily drag and drop content type sections -- or edit the way they display without leaving your homepage!

What you missed. These are still the same 'new content' alerts you may already be receiving, but now you can choose whether you want them daily, weekly (you choose the day!) or not at all. You can change this here.

As always, we hope you enjoy the new features.
We'd love to hear what you think of the changes.

Some types of soup are just yummier than others. For instance, having lunch at the office the other day, a few co-workers and I began discussing the merits of various Chinese soups -- 75% of those present gave egg-drop the thumbs-up. And for good reason: it's awesome.

But there's one type of soup that isn't quite as tasty. I like to call it codec soup.

According to Wikipedia a codec is

a device or program capable of performing encoding and decoding on a digital data stream or signal. The word "codec" is a portmanteau of any of the following: 'Compressor-Decompressor', 'Coder-Decoder', or 'Compression/Decompression algorithm'.

Got all that?

In short, there are dozens, if not hundreds of formats (such as AVI, MPEG, Quicktime and WMV) for encoding video. And if you've ever tried playing a video file and found it entirely didn't work, (or only played its audio track without any visuals... does that sound familiar?), there's a good chance you were missing the codec necessary to decode that particular video format.

If only there were a video format ubiquitous enough to reach nearly everybody on the Internet...

Hey! According to Adobe, Flash is installed in nearly 98% of web browsers, making it a very attractive format for getting video content to people -- and getting them to work without headaches.

That sounds pretty ubiquitous to me. So that's what we're doing. Starting soon, when you upload a video to Multiply, we'll automatically convert it to Flash Video (FLV) format, playable on any computer with Flash 7 or higher installed. It'll even play right in your web browser -- no need to worry about external media playing programs.

We're going to be able to convert most of the popular video formats to Flash, but if we haven't gotten around to your favorite format, just let us know; in the meantime, unsupported formats will still work as they always have -- click the thumbnail, download the video and play it in your program of choice. And as for your existing videos, each will only be converted to Flash the next time they're played, though they'll still be available for download in their original formats.

Video on Multiply: No hassle, no mess. No headaches.
No soup (required) for you.

We recently mentioned that we're working on some new features that will be available soon. Alright, "soon" may have already passed and they're still not quite ready for prime-time, but it's about time we shine a little light on these pearls of greatness.

• Bring it all together. If you've previously posted content to some of the more popular image and video hosting services, including it into your Multiply account will soon be about as ridiculously easy as it is to move content over from services we currently support. (Read: pretty darn easy.)
  
• Post here. Post there. We know that people use different services for their own reasons, so we're making it easier to maintain a blog elsewhere, while still sharing with your Multiply network. Users of Blogger, LiveJournal and TypePad -- get ready to smile a lot.
• Video made simple. We'll take an in-depth look at this new feature in the next few days, but for now, just know that we have the perfect remedy for your web video headaches.
  

We make no promises here, but we'll probably have these ready by early next week.

Excited yet? We are.

We just added some great new features, including four more Gold and Platinum site themes, a "Summary" e-mail alert, and a tool to import photos from Flickr. And, by popular request, we've re-introduced the "table view" option, and made it much better than before. Here's the full list of what's new:

New site themes
Users with Gold and Platinum accounts now have four new custom themes to choose from. Check out Basecamp, Outburst, Avlack and Red Frog here. (Avlack shown to the right).

New e-mail alert summarizes "what you've missed"
We've added a new alert that, in one single e-mail, summarizes what's been shared by the people closest to you during the past week. This alert will the be the new default, replacing the alert that was sent each time a contact adds something new. Now you can post as much as you want without worrying that some of your contacts may be getting too many alert e-mails from Multiply. As always, you can change your alert settings here.

Improved performance
We've tweaked a few things behind the scenes to make Multiply pages come up faster. We're working hard to keep up with the increased demand from our user base.

Display your pages in table view
We've brought back the ability to display your pages in table view, although the feature is slightly different than it was before. Now you can fully control whether your pages are displayed in table view or as full entries. Visitors to your site cannot change that setting, as they could before. Just go to the Settings page and select Page Titles and Layout to check it out.

Flickr import
If you've ever posted photos on Flickr, you can now bring them over to Multiply, where it's much easier to share them with your network. Just click on the New link at the top of any page, select Photos and you'll see a link to import from Flickr.

Improved Linear/Blog layout
We've improved the linear/blog layout so that it displays all of your content in one list, with "next page" links for easy navigation.

Expanded search results
The Search box at the top of any page is an easy way to find content shared by people in your network. And now it's also an easy way to find other Multiply users and groups, and answers to frequently asked questions about the site. Just enter the word(s) or name you're looking for and we'll show you everything that matches.

No more wondering how long it will take your video to upload
We've added a progress indicator for video uploads, so you can see approximately how much time is remaining until your upload is complete.

As promised, we've upgraded the site with a few of our most highly-requested features, including video, music and custom themes! The highlights:

Video
This has been one of our most requested features since Multiply went live, and now it's here. Finally, an easy way to share videos on-line! Check out the Video tab on your site.

Music sharing
Now you can upload music and other audio files to your Multiply site. If you're a musician, sharing your songs with your entire network is a great way to get people listening to your stuff and talking about it. Check out the Music tab on your site.

Themes
Everyone wants to make their home page look a little different and stand out from the rest. Now you don't have to be a web designer to do it. Everyone can select from a number of custom color schemes to personalize their Multiply site! Check it out on the Settings page.

Lighter, easier look-and-feel
We've streamlined Multiply's look to make pages easier on the eyes and faster to load. Plus we've made searching easier by adding a "search" box at the top of every page. There's also an "on-line" indicator on every user's site now, so you can see if someone's currently on-line, or when they last visited Multiply.

No more storage limits
Now there's no need to worry about how close you're getting to the storage limit, because there isn't one. We've switched to a different model - one that will allow you to continue to upload plenty of content, while allowing us to keep our monthly bandwidth costs consistent. Every month, you can upload as many as 150 photos - far more than the average Multiply user shares in a month - and 20 songs (or audio files), with a chance to significantly increase those numbers, as well as the amount of video you can upload. We'll explain in just a moment. And you can continue sharing as many journals, calendar events, reviews, marketplace listings or links as you want. Most importantly, there is no overall limit to the amount of stuff you can share on your Multiply site.

Gold and Platinum accounts
We've said it's "coming soon" for quite a while, and now it's finally here. Our brand new subscription service includes a host of great features! The classic Multiply service - the same things you've been doing since we first went live - will continue to be free of charge. Gold and Platinum accounts will let you get A LOT MORE out of Multiply. Here are the details...