Last week in
Multiply is the new email - Part One, I wrote about Om Malik's article entitled
File Sharing is the new email and explained why I believe that Multiply is a better solution than email for sharing media such as photos and video. But since email is primarily about communication, for something to be considered "the next email" it has to be more than just good for sharing files. It really must succeed at communication outside the context of sharing, which Multiply does.
Here's a table which represents who you can send a message to on various platforms:
| Email | Multiply | Other Networks |
|---|
| Send to individuals | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Send to multiple contacts | Yes | Yes | No |
| Send to whole network | No | Yes | No |
With email, Multiply, and most social networking sites you can send a message and have a discussion with just one individual. But what about sending one message to a group of your contacts at the same time? With most email clients you can configure groupings and fire off a message to a group of email addresses. Multiply offers this functionality as well. More powerfully though, Multiply also offers what I'll call here virtual groups based on your relationships. Whenever you create a connection with someone you specify the relationship (cousin, sister, coworker, friend, fraternity brother, etc.). Based on these, you can easily choose to send a message to your "friends", "family", or "professional contacts". When a new relationship is created a user doesn't need to explicitly add an email address to a configured group. It's managed for you.
Only Multiply, however, allows you to communicate with your network. Other social networking sites may let you contact an individual within your network, but with Multiply you can send a message your whole network at once. The magic of this benefit was discussed in Part One under Audience. Not only is Multiply better for sharing photos than email, in many ways it's more powerful for simply communicating.
Of course, Multiply isn't necessarily suited for all types of communication. We're not about professional correspondence. Our active users still use email to communicate with their professional contacts on professional matters. Likewise, not everybody in the world is on Multiply (or a compatible system) ... yet. But if you look at the table above and the the table which compared Multiply to other sharing solutions, you can see why many of our users, myself included, are abandoning email for their social correspondence and media sharing. If you've got friends and family on Multiply, there's no reason to use email for corresponding with those people.
According to Mr. Malik, the P2P application Pando "
lets users drag and drop files into a "package" which they can then email to friends." How can you consider an application that depends on email, "the new email"? I believe the behavioral transition from email to Multiply that many Multiply users are experiencing makes Multiply more worthy of such a designation.
