the inbox is what intrigued me about multiply and what has kept me there. it makes conversations easy to keep up with in a way that no other feed i’ve seen anywhere has done.

also @gwenny what did you think of the privacy per post ability that you have with multiply? multiply had that going on long before other social networking sites started adding anything of the sort.

one thing that really frustrates me with FB is that i can’t tell, when i’m viewing someone else’s pictures, let’s say, what the privacy setting is. if i reply, who will see my reply? there’s no telling. on multiply, the privacy settings are not only great from the point of view of the person making the post, but from the point of view of the person reading and replying to the post as well.

@ ari — this tutorial group i created might help answer some of your questions about multiply — http://mtutorials.multiply.com

as far as posting in one place and conversing elsewhere… multiply is a walled garden just like facebook is. however, you can post to multiply and have multiply cross-post that entry to several other sites. i know that some people do that who have friends who refuse to leave LJ, blogger, etc. i don’t use that feature myself so i don’t know much more about it. i’ve been encouraging the staff to include some sort of cross-post feature to FB.

the only way to really “get” why multiply rocks is to use it. join a few groups, get to know a few people, invite a friend or two that’s willing to try new things out. once you start using the features, you begin to realize how advanced they are compared to other social networking sites.

that’s not to say that multiply doesn’t still have its problems. groups, for example, could use some better admin features. but the overall skeleton of the system is so sound that it’s easy to overlook smaller problems. FB, on the other hand, seems to be non-intuitive at the core.

@Ari – Yes, we can choose from many base themes and, if we wish, customize any of those using CSS and html.

Since I’m one of the admin’s of the Multiply Design Group, my site is tricked out with a lot of customization features to showcase to the Design group members just some of what they can do. (I will be changing my theme soon though to something cleaner)

The privacy features are second to none on Multiply.com . But it seriously attracts adults that are tired of juvenile “pokes” and “cow tipping”. (Ok I made that up – it’s sheep throwing, right?) They want a social networking site for blogging and sharing photos and videos.

Not only does the Multiply toolbar keep you updated but now they’ve introduced the new auto uploader and media locker, that takes all the work out of uploading and posting content. It does the work while you spend your quality time at Multiply. And best of all, it’s all unlimited. If you wish to consider Premium, you have unlimited online storage for photos and videos without having to actually post them. This is the latest new feature.

Customer support is excellent as well as the User Support Group and other specific help groups for what you need.

So you may not have heard of it, but Facebook definitely has. lol

At stake is most of my friends moved to Facebook and they are the reason I remain on FB. A problem with social networks, in my mind, is when the walls are closed. Facebook allows developers to create applications inside their walls, but Facebook doesn't allow its platform to be seen its proprietary domain. Until that happens, I have no choice but keep with the site.

Now, if I can have a conversation on FB and view it somewhere else, now we're talking.

Gwenny: What's the purpose of Facebook having a fan page on its own site if not to have people become fans? When a small percentage of its user base opt-in to be fans, that's a sign to me.

How confident is the four-year-old company that its model will remain successful when out of 110 million active users, it is lauded by a mere 756,000 fans?

You really lost me here. Nearly a million people have joined a fan group and that’s a sign Facebook is failing?

As for Multiply. It’s been around since 2004? I never heard of it. That is a bad sign. I have accounts on just about every social network on the planet, friends on every continent and get invites to everything and I NEVER heard of it. Or I heard about it, looked at it and meh, nothing to see here.

I went, just now. I looked. ::shrug:: It’s a social networking site. I don’t see the big deal and certainly nothing so impressive I would do all the work to transfer all my data to yet another site that wants to harvest my data. LOL

Though this is definitely improving now with more places to comment on people’s feed items, in general I find FB is a very hard place to have a long, intense conversation. Though you can share photos, they’re uploaded at a low resolution and you can’t print out either your own or your friends’ through any affiliate services. And I have yet to figure out how to upload a video. On the other hand, conversations are easy to have on Multiply in terms of the network infrastructure. Pictures are loaded at larger sizes (and full sized for premium members). And videos are a synch to upload.

FB also doesn’t seem to have a means of archiving conversations. If a conversation erupts from one of my status updates, where it is a week later? Off the page and on to la-la land? On Multiply, old conversations are archived and often easily found again.

And that really only scrapes the surface of why FB is still far behind in the social networking world in my opinion. Granted, they’re flush with cash and I’m finally seeing improvements that I would have expected the site to have added years ago. But the underlying structure of the site remains clunky and largely opaque.