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Divide and Subtract

A bunch of us who've been thinking about online artificial social networks have been known to sign up for each one that comes along and try its features. Each one is a little different, and a couple (Tribe, LinkedIn) have proved to be useful.

When invited to the new site Multiply, I dutifully signed up and looked for stuff to try. There was a feature I hadn't seen elsewhere before: I could import my contacts from other social network sites (Orkut and Friendster), so of course I had to try that out. It worked, and next thing you know, Multiply was spamming all my Orkut contacts with a brainless marketing letter supposedly written by yours truly, only I didn't see it until someone said no, no way, and noted the cheerful Muzak inanity of the message sent in my name. Then others wrote me to say that they were getting multiples of the same message. I made a belated attempt to figure out the site navigation, and while it had looked good initially, I started finding holes - glitches in the information architecture and a persistent dataase error.

A lot of people were talking about Multiply, ultimately, and each time somebody asked me if it was worth an investment of time, my response was a little more dismal. Finally, today, I decided that Multiply really does suck, so I killed some of my data there and tried to find a way out. Finding none, I posted this image as my headshot (and you're welcome to do the same):

Other people are taking time to dig for the histories and predilections of the Multiply founders, but several folks I talked to had the right idea... let's stop going to artificial social network sites and make use of the opend, stable, useful tools we already have for networking over the Internet, witout going to a one-size-fits-all website. Portal strategies keep coming, and keep failing. People like to roll their own.

jon posted this at 12:19 AM
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