Farewell multiply

I can't sleep, it's always difficult to sleep every Sunday night. I'm in bed now, typing on my phone while I think about what's going to happen to multiply.

I never thought multiply would take down the social side of their site. It was the thing that built up it's popularity: virtually unlimited photo sharing. It was a big deal back then, point and shoot digi cams were becoming cheaper and people took literally hundreds of photos at parties. Multiply was the best way to share those photos and "extend" the experience with comments and replies. Facebook limited photo albums to 50 at a time back then, that was something multiply had an edge on. Multiply even had "faceboxes": the precursor to facebook photo tags. You could box the face of yoir friends in photos not unlike facebook tags today. It just never really caught on back then, unlike the way tags are done now

Then it didn't innovate much from there.

There were new "shareable" media things. Like links, blogs and videos. Then you could share audio. I remember a time you could download songs from multiply, people would rip their CDs and post their favourite songs. Then it became an illegal way to download music. Some copyright dodging later, multiply made it so you could not upload certain types of audio files.

After photo sharing. There was the market. People started selling on multiply, using photo albums to display their goods. Multiply just formalized it with the marketplace we have today by organizing vendors, certifying some, improving fulfillment etc. But it's all just "cosmetic" for me, its the users that made that. Not multiply.

Then there's multiply premium which was an early form of a cloud service. It allowed users to save and download High res photos. You had to pay extra though. I don know the exact price, but it was fairly affordable as a lot of people subscribed. I'm not a fan of the "freemium" model. With people as price conscious as Filipinos, most of them will abuse whatever they can get for free

Now it's all going to be gone soon. Memories from late highschool to early college are going to be taken offline. What about all those fun conversations with my friends? How about my photos and blog posts? It'll all be gone. It just saddens me.

I hardly ever log in to multiply nowadays. In the end, it's not personal preference that drives people to a social networking site, it's popularity. The more of your friends are on it, the more likely you'll go there.

Facebook now owns the "general" SNS pie with twitter a close second while niche sites like instagram and pinterest (even friendster) try their best to find their place in the ecosystem. Multiply is just commiting social suicide ( no pun intended)

Multiply is my scrapbook of my teenage years. It's also a place where I write to let go of my feelings and inner conflicts. With multiply killing the social side of their business. Where will I write?

I hope they make a way for me to export my content to a blogspot or something.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'll miss multiply. It's a reminder of the joys of simpler times and an online haven I retreat to. I just wish multiply would have done something to try to revive it instead of going all "marketplace" on me. There aren't enough people like me left I guess.

I'll miss you multiply, I hoped youd be there forever. But we cant have everything, right? Thank you for all the joy and relief you've give me in the past 6 years. I'll always remember you