[Air-L] What went wrong with Multiply?

Nicholas John nikjohn at gmail.com
Thu Jul 21 07:55:05 PDT 2011


I'm doing some historical work on social network sites using the Wayback
Machine and I've come across a site called Multiply. Today Multiply is much
more about shopping than it is a full-blown SNS, but it's fascinating to
look at what it was offering in 2004 - it's About page is basically a
description of what we do on Facebook today.
Most interestingly, though, is the level of granularity it offered in terms
of who could see our posts (not dissimilar to Google+'s circles, which
everyone is so excited about in that it solves a problem in Facebook). For
each post you can specify who can see it at quite a remarkable degree of
granularity (everyone; your network, your contacts, or a custom list). It
also, in 2004, promises alerts when someone in your network does something
(i.e., a news feed).
Was anyone here on that site in those days? Does anyone know what happened
to it given that they really seemed to have online social networking fairly
sussed seven years ago. I'd be very interested to find out...
Thanks
Nicholas
_______________
Dr. Nicholas John
sociothink.com
@nicholasajohn



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