Thoughts on Social Networking with Multiply's CEO

This afternoon I got the chance to talk with Peter Pezaris, founder and chief executive of social networking site Multiply.com, which is based in Boca Raton. Pezaris talked with me about the goals of building Multiply to be the size of MySpace and Facebook in the next one to two years. I interviewed him today about the news that the company received $16.6 million from investors and added former MySpace chairman David Scott Carlick as a board member. (This is really Carlick's MySpace page? Sheish. If so, for someone who was a chairman of MySpace, that's just sad.)

If you're wondering what makes Multiply different from other social networking sites, it comes down to how information is shared between users. To add an already existing user to your friend's list, you have to know their name or e-mail address. There's no random searching to browse through a stranger's profile. And there's no way to just search for users that live in a certain area or that have a certain interest. It's focused around linking with people you already know. But there is some ability to network -- you can see the friends of your friends and if they have posted anything public.

When it comes to privacy levels, you can choose which group of people can see each item posted (videos, blogs, links, comments). Maybe baby pictures are something you only want to share with family, or maybe you want the whole world to see it. You can read more about how Multiply works and the differences in its design here.

The ability to control who sees what is a very important feature to Pezaris. "When you share these things online, sure, some people want to be exhibitionists and share with the whole world," he said, adding that not everyone always wants the whole word to see everything. With MySpace, "your entire profile is either completely open, or completely closed," he said.

I asked him about what he knows about the habits of social networkers: Are they signing up for multiple social networking sites, or choosing one over another because they don't have time to keep up with more than one network?

He said when he surveyed his customers, he said many switched to Multiply after using the other sites. "The answer that really surprised us is that people were telling us that they had tried the other services and none of them really delivered an all-in-one solution they were looking for," he said.

He told me Multiply's demographics are mostly an older crowd and that goes along with how attitudes toward social networking change over time. "The older you are, the more concerned you are about privacy," he said.

He said the first generation of social network users go through the stage of browsing through a million different strangers, but as time goes on, that gets tiresome and users begin to suffer from "social networking fatigue." His theory being that once suffering from social networking fatigue, they turn to a social network like Multiply that has everything in one site (share photos, videos, blog) and a site where they can keep in touch with people that matter in their real-world lives.

I like that term. Social networking fatigue. Between all the social networking groups I'm in and and all the different friends on those networks all the different applications on Facebook and posting photos in one place and videos in another and friend invites from people I never met before and birthday wishes from people I haven't talked to in 5 years.... whew! Now if only I can convince my editor this fatigue requires use of a sick day... hmm.