Multiply CEO Peter Pezaris has moved beyond his past of contributing to Xemacs and selling companies to CBS Sportsline to help build a social networking site; we managed to avoid discussion of a certain other social media site in a recent conversation.
A-list bloggers are the hippies of the 21st Century. They preach peace, love, content sharing, and Web 2.0 IPOs. Instead of a VW van, they tool around in data packets while they cruise the Internet in search of the next great sharing idea.
Unfortunately their soundtrack resembles Woodstock circa 1969, but minus the Jimi Hendrix performance. It’s pretty awful, and there are a lot of people who really don’t want to be part of such a cacophonous crowd.
Not everyone has bought into the share-with-everyone message from our new hippie friends. Strange but true. Multiply takes a discretion-based approach to sharing, permitting users to share with as broad or narrow a range of others as they wish.
Pezaris discussed his social networking site, Multiply, which recently entered version 2.0, during a phone call with us. Multiply takes a different approach to the concept of sharing which Pezaris likened to the “six degrees of separation” idea of how people may be connected based on relationships.
That concept has gained the site around 2.5 million users, and Pezaris said the number of active users out of that number is “sky-high.” Multiply does more than recognize a list of contacts; it understands the relationships that exist between disparate contacts.
The concept works this way: if my brother joined Multiply and we note in the service that the relationship exists, Multiply will know when his wife joins that she is also my sister-in-law.
The sharing part offers a variety of ways to organize contacts and distinguish those organized groups. Multiply maps relationships more accurately between users, according to Pezaris, whether they are friends, family, or business associates. Either the user will know someone directly or indirectly; Multiply will be able to figure out that relationship.
Getting to this point from Multiply’s launch in August 2004 saw the company draw on its tight-knit management team to leverage the “six degrees” concept and apply it to communication. They built the user tools, data tracking, and content management Multiply would need to be successful.
Most recently, Multiply constructed an Ajax-based platform it calls “Live Replies.” Pezaris described this as a “self-assembling chatroom” for real-time communications. When viewing a blog post or a photo album, comments posted to them by others organize in real-time into a virtual conversation.
With Multiply still carrying the beta tag, I asked if version 2.0 represented a complete application today. Pezaris said it is on the way there, with the addition of new features like Live Replies, tagging enhancements, and navigation tweaks.
Oh, and they rounded the corners on various visual elements throughout the site, because it is version 2.0. And, as a user updates content, contacts the user has shared the content with receive notifications on their message boards.
The free service carries advertising as the support model for the business. Multiply also offers three premium tiers of membership at different subscription rates. Those tiers remove the ads and make other features like additional site themes available.
Premium members can upload greater amounts of music, videos, and images each month. No one should have to listen to bad music again, unless they really want it.
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
