August 22, 2012

Go Forth But Don't Multiply

http://manilastandardtoday.com/2012/08/21/go-forth-but-dont-multiply/
This is a link to an article in Manila Standard Today.

Quote from the article:

"Can an online company survive and prosper by alienating and evicting a good chunk of its loyal user base? And will sellers who thrived in an informal environment stick it out when more rules are put in place? Multiply will certainly be an interesting case study in business re-engineering in months to come."

It's a small/webbish world after all

The house kitty corner to ours was sold last spring and a new gal moved in. It turns out I knew her already through Twitter. The house right next to ours had renters in it who had to move. New renters moved in. I just realized this morning that I also knew the guy next door through Twitter. Kinda trippy. 

August 20, 2012

DailySocial - Multiply Tutup Layanan Blog Per 1 Desember 2012 | Indonesian Tech Startup Media

http://dailysocial.net/post/multiply-tutup-layanan-blog-per-1-desember-2012
Interesting post about the demise of Multiply. The article is written in Indonesian, but (with Chrome, at least) you can use the translate button that appears at the top to read it in English.

August 14, 2012

Thoughts on Blogger

I started my first blog using Blogger, way back before Google bought the place. It was a bit funky to use, back then, so I did most of my posting on my own site. But when I discovered Multiply, it was a far superior service to Blogger and it was much easier to post here than to post to my own website.

Well, with Multiply essentially shutting down, I've decided to go back and try Blogger out again. I thought I'd post my thoughts and discoveries as I go in case any of you all are interested. 

I just made a new post and was delighted that I could upload both photos and video to the post. You can also easily edit the added photos even after they've been included into your post. You can resize them with just the click of a button or move them around. Very nice. 

I also like that you can add a custom domain if you'd like. It's something that we've asked for many, many times here in Multiply-land and never gotten. 

I don't see much in the way of privacy settings, though. You can make it so that search engines can't find your blog. And you can choose not to be included in Bloggers list of bloggers. But I don't see any way to set some posts for just a certain circle of friends or anything like that. :-P 

You can include a message to people in the comment form. I assume that tells them something like, "Leave me a note!" when they go to comment on your post. Haven't tried it out yet, though. 

Commenting is a global thing - you can either turn it on for all posts or off for all posts. You can moderate or not moderate comments as you prefer. What's interesting is they also provide an option to only moderate comments after the post is 2 weeks old. So when you first post and are more likely to get a lot of feedback, there's no moderation. But once the post is a bit stale and it's possible it's hit the spammer circuit, that's when moderation kicks in.   ... nope, i take that back. now that i've got commenting turned on, it appears that i can henceforth turn commenting on or off on a per post basis. 

OK, I'm still relearning Blogger, but I'm going to post this so that people can add things that I've missed. I'll also update the post as I learn more, so don't just stick to comments but take a glance back at the original post now and then as well so see if there's anything new. 

I think Blogger will work well for me. Especially with all the new upgrades since I was here last. 

Now to figure out where to take groups....

Additions:

1 - you can set your blog to be visible to only certain email addresses. but it's an all or nothing sort of thing. either all your posts are public or all of your posts are private to these specific email addies. there's no per post settings. there's also no way to set the privacy to one of your Google+ circles. hopefully that will come because it would be much easier than the current system. 

2 - you can't upload a file (other than images) to blogger. you have to upload it to another site (like scribd.com) and then embed it. 

Moving Back In

After spending the past 8 years blogging, community building, and sharing photos, videos, recipes, reviews and links over on Multiply.com, it looks like I might be moving back in to my Blogger space. The site has changed quite a bit from back in 2002, when I first landed here. The themes are far more customizable, I'm hoping it's a bit more integrated with the rest of the internet now, and the user interface is a bit easier to make sense of.

Oh, I do like the changes to photos. You can easily modify the photo after you'd added it to the blog and you can change the size with the click of a link. Gotta admit, that's something Multiply should have added at some point.

I'll be curious to see how my photos integrate with Picasa.

Feel free to post thoughts about the move from Multiply to Blogger if you'd like. Or comment on Blogger in general. No Multiply bashing, though. Naspers is taking the site somewhere that I don't think even the founders are too happy about. But sometimes the economy dictates business growth in a way that even founders can't control. I love what Multiply was and I hope that some day something like that is built again. I'm hoping the use of G+ to integrate all of Google's products might come close to what Multiply was in the early days.

OK, one last test before I go. Can I add a video to this post? Woot! Sure enough! OK, I'm feeling much better about coming back to Blogger. So far, so very good.

August 7, 2012

Multiply is becoming a shops only site.

You all know that I've loved this place since I joined back in September 2004. I'm going to miss it very much. But Myspace and Facebook have taken all the users and the only funding the company could get was towards turning the site into a shopping venue. :-P So I'll be moving my stuff elsewhere. I'll let you know once it gets there. In the meantime, I'm on Google+ as +meg d  and I have a website about local places/events/stuff at http://www.northofprospect.com which you may find interesting even if you don't live around here.