On September 15, I received the following message from Multiply.

| | [img 404] Hello.This is Jack Madrid, Country Manager of Multiply Philippines. Over the past year and a half, Multiply has shifted its business focus on expanding its e-Commerce presence in Southeast Asia, concentrating exclusively on the Philippine & Indonesian markets. It is for this reason that we have a permanent office here in Manila with over 50 employees, while moving the global headquarters from the United States to Southeast Asia (Jakarta). Our mission today is to become Southeast Asia’s most loved online shopping marketplace. Recently, our CEO Stefan Magdalinski announced that as part of this shift in strategic focus to online shopping & selling, we will no longer support the social networking and blogging services that you are currently utilizing. For our users who utilize our social network features (blog, video, photo, etc), we realize that this is painful, and we are launching some tools to help you preserve your content or migrate it to another platform. The export tools are available underneath your headshot in your Multiply site. The export tool enables you to do the following: 1. Download your content to your computer 2. Export to Blogger (a blogging platform owned by Google) Using the export tool: 1. Visit your Multiply page (example: multiplyid.multiply.com) 2. Click one of the options available on your Multiply page (below your headshot): 1. Download Media: to download all media files 2. Export to Blogger: to transfer your blogs to your Blogger page 1. Choose file you would like to download 2. You will receive an email (via the email address registered to your Multiply account) containing a link to download all your Multiply files along with instructions on how to import them to Blogger. (Sample Email)These tools will be available until December 1, 2012 for you to migrate your content. There are efforts underway to offer ways to migrate your content to other platforms such as Tumblr and Wordpress, and we will keep you posted as these options materialize. For more information, please read this list of Frequently Asked Questions on this process. Should you have any questions regarding the export tool, please let us know by dropping an email to csph@multiply.com. Thank you for your kind attention. It has been a joy to have been your trusted partner in the storage and sharing of your lives online and we look forward to remain a part of your lives as we complete our transition into SEA’s leading online marketplace. Warm Regards, Jack Madrid Note: If you are using custom CSS the links to the export tools may not be visible under your headshot. In this case you can use the following urls to access them directly http://(INSERT USER ID).multiply.com/download-mediahttp://(INSERT USER ID).multiply.com/export-to-bloggerhttp://(INSERT USER ID).multiply.com/export-to-tumblr | |—| | |—|

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My first reaction was “Yes! Finally!”, and other things among those lines. I was really ecstatic when I received that message.Actually, before this message came, I have succesfully opened and used this current Wordpress blog, and when Friendster went down I have also successfully transferred those old entries here, which in turn originally was posted in Multiply. But unlike the Friendster event, I feel no sympathy at all (well, maybe a little bit, but that might be my nostalgic side talking) when they sent this message to me.

Why?

Frankly, I do not know. Or maybe it is because I have found a more reliable place to publish my thoughts to the unsuspecting public.

I opened up my Multiply account because I sort of want to have my own blog, and ultimately, my own website. What attracted me to that platform is its simplicity and customizability, and more importantly I have friends (physical, not virtual) who use that platform for their blogs, pictures, videos, and other stuff they want to share to the world.

But when Wordpress came, I became disappointed with it.

I really don’t know why, but it maybe because Wordpress is a really damn good blogging platform, enabling you to keep track of everything easily. Honestly, I don’t want to justify it; I am just happy that I can finally move on without Multiply.

According to Multiply:

You have been a member since October 13, ‘07. You last signed in on December 2, ‘12 from 121.97.142.167. Your e-mail address is [Email address omitted to avoid spamming]

I really have no qualms about Multiply per se; their services were good (even though I am only using its “basic” form, just like how I use Wordpress), the interface user-friendly. It was just like Friendster plus a blog. In fact, it was my first blog which enabled me to explore my creative side (if I really had one). But then, it might just be the urge to move on that made me agnostic to what just happened.Maybe I have just have stopped here if not for a great blunder Multiply made: their export tool.

Compared to Friendster, which (as far as my experience would credit me) have really thought about their tool, my impression with Multiply is that they just whipped up a quick html page with links directing to the actual media file that will trigger a browser download, which essentially it really was. They did provide an export tool to Blogger for the blog entries, with the tasty tidbit of providing one to Wordpress after some time, but at the time of writing they still don’t have it. And these tools in my case did not work. Apparently, they have emailed me about enabling zip downloads for photo albums, which I later found in my spam folder. Fortunately, I saw that and, yes, it worked! I was able to retrieve photos which I could not when using their media download page (the one with simple links). A former professor of mine was so disappointed about their media export tool that he himself coded a tool of his own.

Anyway, as you can maybe guess from my style of writing this that I am not really interested to write about it. Maybe I was just pressured to write something, since I did a similar thing when Friendster went down, albeit with a little more passion. I’m just glad that I can now move on, finally having everything consolidated in a single site. Anyway, it seems like Multiply has really moved on, and they gladly boast it through the title tag of their home page:

One of the world’s largest online social shopping malls connecting sellers with shoppers safely and easily - Multiply

With this in mind, I gladly cancel my five-year-old account. Let this blog entry be my boring epithet to that. ###### Related articles

• How to keep your Multiply memories (rappler.com)
• How to Export Photo& Video from Multiply (jurnalin.wordpress.com)
• Blogging (cadencies.com)

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