Multiply is making a comeback as a photo and video site, more than seven years after it went close down last May 6, 2013 and ceasing all business operations on May 31, 2013.
There will be photos and videos from the old Multiply accounts from 2004 to 2013, Webshots accounts from 1999 to 2012, Friendster accounts from 2002 to 2011 and Fotolog accounts from 2002 to 2015.
Multiply is looking to embrace the “digital mom”. Recognizing that many of the site’s members are adults looking to share their media with loved ones, the site has adopted an interface that is best described as a media inbox. When you first log in, the site presents you with a stream of content similar to Facebook’s news feed. Your friends’ newest events, messages, and photo albums appear in the main column, with thumbnails next to each.
Navigation through the new interface largely revolves around a new sidebar at the left hand side of the screen, which strongly resembles something you might see in an Email client. The panel includes links to your most important friends and family, allowing you to make sure you catch all of their latest updates. Likewise, there are filters for the site’s groups, and you can create powerful custom filters – a feature that will appeal to power users.
Aside from this feed of new items, the other main area to get an overhaul in Multiply is the Media Locker, where you can upload and manage all of your photos, videos, and blog posts. This is where the new site really shines – Multiply’s photo manager strongly resembles native photo software like iPhoto, allowing you to drag and drop photos into whatever albums you’d like. You can use a slider to adjust how large the thumbnails appear during navigation, and the top bar includes handy links that let you quickly share albums via Email or through Multiply itself. It’s also much easier to export photos to the site’s printing storefront, which allows you to have your images printed into physical photo books, cups, and other products.
The Media Locker also includes a number of basic photo editing features, like red-eye reduction, color adjustment, and image cropping. Multiply isn’t the first social network to offer these features (MySpace launched similar tools earlier this year), but unlike the MySpace editor Multiply’s doesn’t need a Flash embed. To get your photos onto Multiply, the site offers a range of plugins for your computer’s photo software, as well as an AIR application that can monitor your folders for any new images as they are imported from your camera.
My one major gripe with the new site is the inconsistent appearance of the sidebar. While it appears and changes contextually when you’re in the Inbox or Media Locker sections, any time you visit a page or album on a friend’s profile, the sidebar vanishes. You can still get back to the other pages using the links at the top of the screen, but it’s strange for a UI element that seems persistent to disappear occasionally (imagine if Facebook’s menubar at the bottom of its pages only showed up some of the time).
Aside from that, Multiply’s site seems solid, offering a social network that can really do your media justice. Facebook may be the web’s leading photo sharing service, and it’s great for sharing day to day photos with friends. But for those shots that really matter you can’t beat full resolution, which Facebook doesn’t offer. Multiply allows users to upload full resolution photos, with the option of paying $20/year for an unlimited amount of storage to to have them all backed up. Multiply isn’t going to overtake Facebook any time soon, but it’s doing a great job bridging the gap between photo sharing services like Flickr and the larger social networks.
No comments:
Post a Comment