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.

Om Malik recently wrote an article entitled File Sharing is the new email in which he compared the latest breed of peer-2-peer applications for sharing files. While I understand the need for a bold, attention grabbing headline, I figured, especially since I haven't written in a while, I'd point out why these applications are not a replacement for e-mail nor necessarily the best way for the average user to share files.

For starters, let's examine the ways the article above discusses for sharing, as well as Multiply.

	Email	Flickr/YouTube	Shutterfly/Kodak	P2P Apps	Multiply
Barrier to entry	None	Sign-up	Sign-up	Download, Setup, Configure	Sign-up
Audience	Your Contacts	"The World"	Your Contacts	Your Contacts	Your *Real* Network
How to Share	Select, Upload	Select, Upload	Select, Upload	Select, Many behind the scenes uploads	Select, Upload
Communication	Disjointed / Fleeting	Comments	Comments	Disjointed / Fleeting	Discussions

Barrier to Entry: Perhaps email's last advantage is everyone has it. Anyone can send an email with 10MB of attachments, and chances are, regardless of how disgruntled the recipient is, they'll open the attachments and see the pictures. The web-based solutions generally require a simple registration. But the P2P apps require both parties to download and install applications. People may download a required application such as a web browser. But with all the alternative solutions for sharing files, good luck getting mass adoption with this relatively high barrier-to-entry.

Audience: As Mr. Malik wrote in his article "There are websites like Flickr and YouTube, of course, where users can post photos and video -- but those are designed for material you want to share with the world, not just a few friends or family members." The other solutions are limited to sharing with those whose email address you posses.

Only Multiply lets you share with your real social network. By real I mean people you are truly connected to in the real-world as opposed to on a site like MySpace where your network has 70 million people in it because every user is connected to Tom. Lots of people over the age of, say 25, may ask, "Why do I want to share with my network... people I don't know?" First of all, there are tons of people you do know that you simply don't have their email address. Do you posses the email address of every one of your college friends that you simply lost touch with? What about every cousin?

Second, there are a ton of people you don't know that really, really care about your stuff. Some of my favorite examples involve my mom. I'm the proud father of a 7 month-old son which makes my mom the typical proud grandmother who loves showing off her grandson. With Multiply my mom's friends (that I don't know) get to see my pictures of my son despite the fact that I don't have their email addresses. Another example is that when my friend from kindergarten (through today) G.J. posts pictures of his family, my mom who witnessed G.J. growing up too and would love to see these pictures, gets to. It's awesome and this magic is unavailable anywhere else. (Of course, you don't have to share everything with your network; you can share with just contacts or individuals for more privacy.)

How to Share: Most of the solutions involve selecting photos and uploading them. The upload step is a little more transparent with email, but whether waiting a few minutes for photos to upload to a web-site, or for an email to go out, it's the same thing. With the P2P solutions you still have to select the photos to share. The big advantage of the P2P solutions is that you don't have to upload something...but this advantage diminishes as bandwidth speeds increases, and for the most part people generally don't need to share full high-resolution files. (Update- it was pointed out to me that even with P2P, files are still uploaded from the owner's PC. It happens behind the scenes but everytime time someone else wants to see the files which could tie up bandwidth at an inconvenient time for the sharer.)

Communication: All the applications discussed involve some mechanism for notifying the people you want to share with that new files are available (with only Multiply allowing you to go beyond your contact list). With email this initial notification step is inherent, and the P2P applications reviewed by Mr. Malik are building their sharing tools around email or IM-like processes. The problem is that any communication that results from email or IM-like solutions is disjointed and fleeting. For starters, it is separate from the photos. Getting a reply like "You look great in this shot" is meaningless without the shot....especially as time progresses and the initial email with the photos was deleted. Secondarily, if you send pictures to a dozen people via email, some will "reply-to-all" and some just to you. Some that reply will quote the original message, and some won't. A few people. A few replies. A big mess.

The other web-based solutions do allow people to add comments to photos, but nobody (other than perhaps the owner of the photos) gets notified. This hinders communication. If I post pictures from a party for my friends on Shutterfly and my friend Dave replies today "That party was a blast" and tomorrow my friend Peter replies "Dave, what were you thinking with that outfit?" nobody will know what Dave was thinking because Dave has no way of knowing a new comment was added. Is he supposed to constantly go back and check every album or video he ever looked at?

Multiply's message board not only notifies people when content is added, it notifies people when replies are added as well. This creates discussions as opposed to a handful of comments. And since these discussions can involve your whole social network and not just a few contacts, they are more interesting and exciting. More people that care about me as well as care about Peter and Dave - their friends and family that wouldn't be aware of my pictures on another site - can take part.

Thus far, I've focused on why Multiply is better than email for sharing photos and videos. But since email, like Multiply, is primarily about communication, for something to be considered "the next email" it should really succeed at communication outside the context of sharing. That'll be the focus of Part Two.

The technical requirements for a screensaver are kind of simple. It should come on when you’re not using your computer for a little while, and the display should change. If a screensaver does that, most people are content and hardly give their screensaver a second thought. You may spend a few minutes going through the dozen or so screensavers that come with your operating system to find one that suits you. You may even download or buy something a little more interesting to you. But even in these cases, after a few months (if not days) it still becomes something you ignore.

A few months ago we decided it may be fun to create a screensaver for Multiply, one that would rotate through new pictures posted to the site. I anticipated that because the pictures changed the screensaver would be a little less boring than the average screensaver, but I still thought it would be something I eventually took for granted. Boy, was I wrong. I think the screensaver is an awesome application (and I’m not saying this as a biased Multiply employee…I’m saying this as an average user).

For starters, it helps me know what is going on with my friends and family without any time commitment. Let me repeat. No time. "I’m too busy" is not an excuse to not use the screensaver. You’re already running a screensaver, right? It is also cake to install. Actually, if you have a broadband connection and run WindowsXP (the only requirements) it will take you less time to have this running than to finish reading this review. So, if you’re not using the screensaver, stop reading and

download the screensaver.

Seriously. If you got this far and haven’t installed it yet, click on the link above. If I see in the Viewing History that you’ve read this review and you’re not running the screensaver I’m going to be very upset.

Now, where was I? Oh yeah, no time commitment. Even I who spend lots of time on Multiply for obvious reasons do not go through and look at every single picture posted by everyone in my social network. For my contacts I do generally open up every album, and at worst just view the thumbnails and read the discussions to make sure I don’t miss anything. More often, I’ll go through the albums picture by picture or open up a handful based on the thumbnails. On a daily basis though I’ll come back to my desk and see, via the screensaver a picture (yes, of someone I know) that I’ve never seen before, and every time I do it makes my day a little better. I know that sounds corny, but when you get back to your desk, what do you see? Flying windows? That’s not making your day any better.

Another thing I like about the screensaver is that photos are displayed full-screen. Even when going through an album picture by picture on Multiply, you don’t often view the hi-res version, at least not for every picture. It is great seeing pictures in all their full-screen glory. No borders, links nor toolbars. No web-browser windows. No desktop icons. Just greatly detailed views of pictures.

For those of you that ignored my suggestion to download and install because you want to know how it works, it is simple. You download it. During installation you enter your Multiply id and password. Then each night it downloads new pics. That’s it. On the Settings page you can configure whose pictures it downloads. Now you (if you have WindowsXP/broadband) have no excuses to not try it out, especially if you had the time to read through this far.

A few months ago I wrote a couple of journal entries (Social Networking is Not Broken and Fixing Social Networking) in which I stated that the phrase “social networking” is terribly vague as it can represent a ton of different things. However, as nebulous a term as that is, it is just a subset of an even more nebulous expression…”social software”.

According to Wikipedia, social software lets people rendezvous, connect or collaborate through a computer network or networks. Gee, that limits things. The wikipedia entry then lists some examples of social software including wikis, blogs, internet forums, social bookmarking, social networks, instant messaging, and even multiplayer online games.   

Too often software is considered social not because it encourages socialization, as per the broad definition above, but rather because it serves as a platform for sociology. To elaborate, compare match.com -  a dating site where people rendezvous in an effort to connect in the most social of ways - to a site like del.icio.us, which lets people tag, share, and browse bookmarks publicly. By aggregating links via tags, del.icio.us does provide interesting insight into what society is thinking. But the only socializing with del.icio.us is among those that study social trends and social software.  If del.icio.us is considered social software then so should Excel and MySQL because they, likewise, are just tools for storing, reporting, and analyzing data.  

Despite the fact that a dating site encourages socialization more than a social bookmarking site, dating sites are not listed as examples of social software on the wikipedia entry. The list of examples more puzzlingly doesn’t include the granddaddy of social software, e-mail.  More people probably rendezvous, connect or collaborate via plain old e-mail than all the other examples of social software combined. The reason that e-mail and dating sites aren’t listed is not because they don’t encourage socializing, but rather they are simply not en vogue with those that study social behavior or write about social software. E-mail communication is, for the most part, private. There’s no place for someone to log in and see what hot topics people are e-mailing each other about today. A site like del.icio.us lets anyone login and see what a million strangers are bookmarking. Unlike e-mail, del.icio.us provides great fodder for Many 2 Many: A group weblog on social software or the social software weblog and the ability for software to provide this fodder is seemingly a more important consideration than the ability to facilitate socialization.  

In the article The Road Ahead in the10/24 issue of Time Magazine, Esther Dyson, the editor of the Release 1.0 newsletter for CNET Networks, was quoted as saying sharing photos on Flickr has brought her family closer. Flickr, like del.icio.us, lets you check out what strangers are doing (in Flickr’s case, you can see what photos they are sharing). It’s a little exhibitionist, a little voyeuristic, but most importantly sociological. The ability to see popular tags at a global level provides great fodder and, indirectly, provides a platform for the development of interesting analytical tools… thus providing more fodder for the social software bloggers and other sociologists. Those valuable merits, however, do not mean it is the best photo sharing tool in terms of bringing your family closer.  

At Multiply, our goal was not to design an application that provides data for sociologists to analyze; it was to encourage socialization among your family and friends. Our proprietary convergence of content-sharing tools with a true message board encourages ongoing discussion, not just a random comment or two, but real conversations…socializing in the truest sense of the word. Likewise the social networking component allows me, for example, to mutually share photos with my mom’s cousins and my wife’s distant relatives….family I previously didn’t keep in touch with or even know. Multiply brings families closer in ways no other site can approach.    

If you had a half hour of extra leisure time and were given the choice to look through new photos taken by friends and family or new photos taken by strangers, which would you pick?  The former is the more social response.  Sites like Flickr and del.icio.us are great for analyzing what a million strangers are up to. That’s just sociology.

A few days ago I received my October 4, 2005 edition of PC Magazine in the mail.  On the cover at the absolute top was the caption “BEST PHOTO-SHARING WEB SITES”. Upon reading that on the cover I was immediately pissed off because I assumed Multiply wasn't covered. If this was a year ago I would’ve wondered anxiously, “Did they review Multiply?”.  But I know better now. I quickly flipped to the article and started reading the preamble which included “For this roundup, we judged sites by how well they let you share photos and by how many extras they offer.”  Interesting. My anger dissipated and I thought, “hmm, maybe they did cover Multiply.” I then scanned the sites reviewed…twice…could not find Multiply… and got upset again.

When reading the cursory reviews of the sites I determined that Multiply compared favorably in terms of our photo sharing features to all the sites mentioned. As far as “extras they offer” though, Multiply in my not so humble opinion blows everyone else away. Some examples:

1.    Of the ten sites reviewed only one allows uploading of video in addition to photos. (Considering that the same digital cameras that take pictures also shoot video I am surprised this wasn't a more important criteria.)
2.    Only two allow categorization by tagging (and neither of these are the one that offers video, and one of these doesn’t offer photo printing).
3.    Only one has integrated blogging tools (and it isn’t one of the three above).
4.    None allow you to share music or links.
5.    None allow you to share with your social network.
6.    Most importantly, none provide the integration of photo sharing with a social-network driven message board that facilitates turning photo albums into conversations, which is really what sharing is all about.

So, considering the above I can only think of three reasons why Multiply wasn’t considered for this round-up. First, maybe PC Magazine simply never heard of Multiply, or second, they don’t consider us a photo sharing site. But in the January 14 issue of PC Magazine, it was written in a review of Multiply that Multiply affords you a type of social interaction that you can't get with typical blogging or photo-sharing services.  Clearly they’ve heard of us, and that quote also implies that they consider us a photo-sharing service.

My assumption then is reason #3, PC Magazine doesn’t appreciate the degree to which we’ve executed on building a truly convergent product. Since we’re not just a photo-sharing site, we’re not up for consideration as one of the best photo-sharing sites despite the items enumerated above.

The lack of appreciation for convergence isn’t just limited to PC Magazine. Just take a look at the blogging and press coverage of Flickr and Del.icio.us, two darlings of the Technorati crowd. For the most part, Flickr just lets you tag photos and look through strangers’ photos, and, Del.icio.us just lets you tag links and look through strangers’ links. Both sites can be considered inventive, but also extremely simple. So simple in fact, that one of our developers burped, and now you can tag your content on Multiply. If you’re a Multiply user and not familiar with tagging check out this overview on how to use them.

It seems that because Multiply lets you tag your photos, video, blog entries, music, and links, we’re guaranteeing ourself less coverage than a site whose sole existence is letting you tag one type of content. That’s a shame because convergence is something that users really appreciate. In some of our users’ words rather than mine:

I much prefer Multiply because I have my own website, journal, photos, etc. all in one. I don't need to login to a billion other websites to check each of these.

I wouldn't use anything other than Multiply because the technologies would be spread across multiple web-sites and that's a lot more hassle.

I had searched endlessly for a site that offered photo albums, journals etc. over a period of months and found nothing comparable.

I like how Multiply puts them together in one. It's convenient not to have to sign in to multiple sites.

I have not seen anything as comprehensive as this before.

Nothing compares to Multiply because everything is in one place.

I don't like having to log into a separate site for every single thing I want to do. It's much easier to have things in one place, and of the "one stop" sites out there, Multiply is the best implemented.

If you were to ask any of these users what the best photo-sharing web site is, they would say Multiply because of its convergence, the same convergence that excludes us from being considered one of the best photo-sharing web sites by PC Magazine. This is what I refer to as the convergence disconnect and the cause of this disconnect can be described in one word: convenience.

Consumers like convergent products because they provide convenience. Take my Treo 600 for example. Is the phone as small and sleek and comfortable in my pocket as the tiniest cell-phones out there? No. Is it as easy to move MP3s from my computer to the Treo as it is to a dedicated MP3 player? No. Does the convenience of being able to carry my cell phone, PDA, a couple hours of tunes, and a web-browser in one device make up for the sacrifices? Yes, many times over. It's the same thing with Multiply. As per the quotes above, consumers like being able to log into one site, not many, because it is much more convenient.

Convergence is not convenient, however, for journalists that cover technology. The number of sites that have photo sharing in some capacity is probably ten times that of those that do nothing but photo sharing. It's more convenient to focus on the severely limited group. Limiting the scope is an easy way to limit the amount of time spent researching and reviewing sites, thus in turn increasing profit. The decision may be good business, but I also believe it does a disservice by not informing readers of their best options.