Sebuah Kisah Dari Multiply

Ketika pemerintah mengumumkan secara resmi telah memblokir beberapa website, antara lain Myspace, Multiply, Youtube dan Rapidshare, reaksi paling hebat yang saya baca dari beberapa teman saya yaitu mengenai kesedihan mereka karena ditutupnya akses Multiply.

Seperti komentar yang saya baca dari beberapa orang berikut ini :

 “multiply = sebagian nyawa kita.”

 ”Yes, 50% aktivitas dunia maya gue adalah Multiply.”

 ”Sarana penghubung dengan teman2 pun sebentar lagi sirna...
kehilangan up date yg ga bisa didapat selain di multiply.”

”Sebagai ibu-ibu autis minim gosip dan pengetahuan.. saya sangat haus akan multiply.. kalo sampe di blok- apa kabar hidup sayaaaaaa???”

 
Mungkin ada yang menganggap beberapa komentar di atas terlalu berlebihan. Namun lain hal dengan saya dan mungkin banyak orang lainnya di luar sana yang menganggap Multiply tidak hanya sekedar blog semata.

Multiply juga menjadi sarana untuk mengetahu info-info terbaru dari banyak orang ataupun menjadi wadah interaksi dunia maya (kelanjutannya bisa menjadi ajang diskusi menarik) dengan teman-teman yang sesungguhnya juga kita kenal di dunia nyata. Walaupun pada kelanjutannya, melalui Multiply, saya juga banyak mendapat teman baru yang seterusnya juga menjadi teman di dunia nyata.

Multiply bagi saya juga menjadi wadah untuk belajar menulis. Bisa dikatakan aktifitas menulis saya secara aktif dimulai saat saya membuat account multiply pada tanggal 25 Juni 2005. Sebelumnya saya tidak pernah membuat blog.

Saya masih ingat, awalnya membuat multiply gara-gara sering melihat postingan Uga di milis C’mon Lennon. Saat itu Uga sering sekali memposting foto-foto saat C’mon Lennon manggung, dan selalu foto-foto itu berasal dari Multiply. Lalu saya dengan inisiatif sendiri, berusaha mencari tahu apakah Multiply itu. Dan karena lengkapnya fasilitas yang diberikan oleh Multiply (mulai dari blog, foto, musik dan video), saya lalu tertarik untuk mendaftar.

Tidak berapa lama, saya lalu mencoba mengupload foto. Kalau tidak salah foto pertama yang saya upload adalah foto-foto saat Ballads of the Cliche membuat videoklip di PRJ. Saya lalu memberitahu teman kampus saya Felix, yang menjadi manager Ballads of the Cliche mengenai postingan tersebut. Di kemudian hari, Felix pun tertarik untuk membuat account di multiply.

Sejarah berbicara, karena Felix ini juga rasanya Multiply menjadi perhatian besar bagi sebagian kalangan karena review fenomenal yang telah ditulis Felix melalui blognya di Multiply. Felix pun pernah mengaku kepada saya, karena review tersebut, banyak orang yang sebenarnya tidak mempunyai account Multiply, pada akhirnya membuat account gara-gara ingin ikutan menulis comment. Harusnya Felix dibayar oleh Multiply untuk ini :D

Yah, hampir tiga tahun saya menggunakan Multiply, tapi tidak sedikit pun saya pernah mengalami kebosanan seperti apa yang saya alami dengan web social networking lainnya.

Salah satu penyebabnya adalah fasilitas unggulan Multiply yaitu fasilitas Inbox yang memungkinkan kita dapat melihat setiap postingan terbaru dari teman yang telah menjadi contact kita sampai kepada orang-orang yang mungkin kita tidak pernah tahu wujud asli dan asal-usulnya.

Tiada yang lebih mengasyikan saat membaca gosip-gosip lokal (dengan comment-comment kontroversial) atau info terbaru yang diposting orang-orang di Multiply. Atau saat melihat foto-foto dari event yang kita datangi atau yang tidak sempat kita datangi. Bahkan curhatan seseorang pun bisa menjadi menarik di Multiply. Walaupun curhatan tersebut berasal dari mereka yang tidak kita kenal secara langsung. Dampaknya, mungkin kita bisa merasa lebih dalam mengenal mereka, atau bisa lebih akrab dengan pola pikir mereka.

Pagi ini, saya tanpa sengaja membaca sebuah tulisan yang ditulis oleh presiden dan CEO dari Multiply yang bernama Peter Pezaris. Peter mungkin tidak sepopuler dan seeksis Tom Myspace, namun yang pasti dia telah membantu banyak orang di luar sana dengan membuat wadah interaksi dunia maya yang berguna. Terima kasih banyak, Peter.

Dibawah ini adalah tulisannya.

 
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.