5 Questions with Multiply.com’s Peter Pezaris
|
Written By Reprise Media | July 25, 2005 | Share This
|
|
Last April we told you about Multiply.com, a new social networking tool that allows you to share content with others in your network in a manner different than the ’six degrees of separation’ schtick favored by many in this space. We recently got a chance to speak with Peter Pezaris, President and Founder of Multiply about content sharing, what he thinks of the competition, industry naysayers and more.
1. A few months ago Multiply launched a photo sharing screensaver that updates itself daily with pictures from a user’s family and friends. What impact do you think photo sharing will have on social networking as well as the traditional news media in the months to come?
Social Networking has become a very loose term that’s been used to describe a number of very different applications. We believe that functions like photo sharing are part of a much larger and more important market called social communications.
Informally, social communications is the idea of sharing your stuff with your friends. More specifically, enabling communication and sharing of digital content with the group of people that you either know directly, or indirectly through friends of friends.
It’s a sweet spot of publishing power in between a site like Blogger (where you’re publishing for the whole world to see) and email (where you have a finite recipient list). We have created powerful tools to enable our users to share their personal digital content with the people who might possibly care about it; all the people that they know in their lives. Just as importantly, we enable users to engage in simultaneous discussion with their entire social network - something that is unavailable anywhere else in any form.
2. How is Multiply going to overcome the barriers to entry that bigger companies like Yahoo, MSN and Google, who’ve launched their own social networks (Yahoo360, Spaces, and Orkut, respectively), don’t have to face given their size and built-in user base?
I think we’ll overcome those barriers by offering a superior product, which is exactly what we’re doing. Those sites (Yahoo 360 in
particular) are attempting to do what we’ve already done, however they are missing a key component - the most critical piece!
Yahoo 360 can be described as a multiple page multimedia blog. But it’s got the same problem that all blogging sites do, namely that it takes a lot of effort to maintain a blog when nobody is reading it.
Multiply was designed from the ground up to primarily be a communications platform. We provide users their own social-network-based message board. So not only do I get notifications when new content is posted in my social network, I am alerted to replies to that content as well, which enables communication and discussion on a broad scale.
Being able to actually communicate with your entire social network is a feature unique to Multiply, and is the cornerstone of social communications.
3. On a related note, lately it seems the trend for niche companies such as Flickr, Picasa, and most recently MySpace to build up a cool service and then sell it to a bigger, more established firm. Is that in the cards for Multiply?
Our first venture, Commissioner.COM, followed a similar path. We developed fantasy sports on-line and by providing market-leading technology our little company ended up powering the fantasy games of almost all the major sports web sites, including NFL.com, NBA.com, MLB.com, CBS SportsLine, AOL Sports, PGATOUR.com and CNN/SI. We later sold our firm to CBS SportsLine and fantasy sports has become a very successful part of their business.
Large companies are starting to realize how important personal publishing is, and we believe that social communications takes that idea to an entirely new level. So while Multiply isn’t actively seeking out a buyer, we are intrigued about the potential of a partnership with a larger media player.
4. What would you say to social networking naysayers such as Molly Wood of CNET who says that existing services offer users nothing compelling to do and do not deliver a strong value proposition to advertisers?
She’s mostly pointing out the limitations in the current offerings of social networking sites, and in many ways I agree with her. The internet’s killer application always has been, and always will be communication. By basing a messaging platform on top of a user’s existing social network, Multiply enables its users to communicate more powerfully then they have been able to before.
If you look at the advances in communication technology, you’ll see that with each technology, an entire industry has sprung up. Like email and IM before it, Multiply lets users talk in a new way - in our case by facilitating the communication and sharing of digital content with broad groups of people you already know.
One of my partners, Michael Gersh, actually responded to her article in great depth in his blog. To summarize what he wrote, journalists need to stop focusing on social networking as an industry unto itself but simply recognize that social networking is merely a component of an application, just like a contact list is a component of an e-mail program. As I wrote before, Multiply is about sharing digital media and communication and we use your social network the same way as your e-mail program uses your contact list - as a component to facilitate communication.
Not every site that incorporates social networking has the same application, and in our case the application isn’t even networking or meeting new people. If Ms. Wood didn’t find value with Orkut or Friendster, it’s because she didn’t find value in the application they offer. Just because their application uses social networking doesn’t mean social networking doesn’t work.
I’d also like to point out that our goal isn’t primarily to deliver a strong value proposition to advertisers, but rather to deliver one to our users. The fact that we derive revenue from non-advertising sources like photo-printing and subscription upgrades that allow users to share more photos and video exemplifies how different Multiply is from the limited sample of social networking sites the naysayers refer to.
5. Before joining Multiply you served as CBS SportsLine.com’s President of Operations and Product Development. Now that you’re working in social networking, do you still keep up on sports scores? What’s your favorite sport to watch? To play?
Actually, now that sports is no longer my job I’m more of a fan than I’ve been in a while. In the past, opening day and the Superbowl meant over-time and monitoring servers. That, and being a workaholic is not a great formula for watching much sports. Fortunately Multiply is about keeping in touch with people so even though I’m still working long hours, I’m more involved with my friends and family than I’ve been in years.
My favorite sports to watch are baseball and football, specifically the Red Sox and Patriots. The timing of my career switch couldn’t have been better because I had an opportunity to appreciate the Sox season from a fan’s perspective, and the recent dynasty of the Pats. As far as playing sports, well, any free time I have now gets spent with my one year-old son Dimitri, the cutest kid ever. Don’t believe me? See for yourself.
Topics: Interviews |
Cool, I wasn’t aware of this person’s previous encounters on net within the sports genre. His experience clearly comes to the fore, in the above-board manner, (I as a newbie, in this scenario have found) this site so far, to be the easiest to use, is very close to a seamless op, as to instant newspeak via subscribers…Keep up the good work.
Thank you, for this tech., and concept.
what is happening with multiply.com?since they introduced their chat feature, using multiply.com is almost impossible, with runtime errors etc a constant pain. if i can navigate at all, it takes longer than dial-up downloading BenHur. multiply are losing ppl faster than a ferret up a drain pipe because of the hostile nature of its meebo powered chat forum which seems to affect almost all types of server and many of my contacts have just given up.
time to lose the chat if it cannot b made friendlier and more to the point - usable
Yeah, runtime errors really is terrible. But with the rate of 1-10, multiply for me is 8.5,,,,not bad!