[Air-L] What went wrong with Multiply?

[Dr. Rasha Abdulla]

Very good point, but what creates the cultural dynamics? How are these
formulated?

On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 2:24 AM, danah boyd <aoir.z3z at danah.org> wrote:

> Multiply was launched in the States but quickly became popular in the
> Philippines (and other South Asian / Pac Island countries) pretty quickly;
> it competed with Friendster pretty heavily for a while and then it got
> bought by some other company and became stale (keep in mind: all social
> network sites that had to go through a sales transition lost serious ground
> in the process).  They tried to differentiate themselves from competitors by
> basically throwing in every social feature known to man.  This overload
> worked for some, but also made it unappealing for others.  Classic story of
> SNS competition at the time.
>
> And Jeremy's right - it was always about consumerism and the features that
> it had were nothing new (just like G+'s features are nothing new).
>
> What folks never seem to remember in this space is that it's *NEVER* about
> the features.  It's about the cultural dynamics.
>
> danah
>
>
> On Jul 21, 2011, at 10:55 AM, Nicholas John wrote:
>
> > 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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> ------
>
> "taken out of context, i must seem so strange" -- ani
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> http://www.danah.org/
> @zephoria
>
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Rasha A. Abdulla, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Journalism and Mass Communication
The American University in Cairo
www.rashaabdulla.com
http://twitter.com/RashaAbdulla <http://twitter.com/rashaabdulla>