We’ve now remodeled social network valuations based on current user numbers and Facebook’s most recent $10 billion valuation. The results are dramatically different.

Based on the original year-old model, if Facebook was worth $15 billion (their then-current valuation), MySpace, with far more U.S. users, was worth nearly $20 billion:

Our model takes Comscore data for available countries and regions. We’ve graphed each of 26 well known social networks with the data we have been able to collect. We’ve then calculated the average advertising spend (estimated by PriceWaterhouseCoopers in a recent report) for each person online in each of those countries. For example, in the U.S., the total 2008 estimated Internet advertising spend is $25.2 billion. We’ve divided that by the number of people online in the U.S. according to Comscore (191 million), to get an average Internet spend per person of $132. View the raw data and calculations here.

The U.S., by the way, is only the 4th most valuable market per Internet user, trailing The UK ($213), Australia ($148) and Denmark ($144).

We’ve then multiplied the average Internet spend per user in each market with the number of unique users each social network has in that market, essentially creating a “weighted average” based on the advertising dollars chasing users. If a social network has more users in the U.S., Japan, the UK, Germany, Australia, and other bigger advertising networks, they will have a higher weighted average valuation.

We believe this model is an effective way to rank various competing social networks. It bumps down networks like Orkut and Friendster who have tens of millions of users in markets with very little advertising spend, and bumps up networks with lots of users in higher value markets.

Based on this model, MySpace is by far the most valuable social network. Second place Facebook has just 75% of the value of MySpace (even though it now has more users), followed by Bebo (26% of MySpace value), Hi5 and Amebio. LinkedIn comes in at no. 11, at 6% of MySpace’s value.

The new model takes into account the dramatic rise of Facebook usage over the last year, the massive recent decline in MySpace usage, and less dramatic changes in the other social networks. We’ve also modeled out the various valuations with the old Bebo ($850 million) and LinkedIn ($1 billion) valuations as pivot points. We’ve also added Twitter to the list just for kicks.

The bottom line: If Facebook is worth $10 billion today, MySpace is worth just $6.5 billion. Bebo is worth $1.8 billion, Twitter is worth $1.7 billion and LinkedIn is worth $0.8 billion. Facebook also accounts for 37% of all social networking value points in our model. Another way of saying this: If Facebook is worth $10 billion, the value of the entire social networking industry is $27.1 billion.

Lots of charts and graphs below. The full model is here if you want to look at all the data (I recommend zooming unless you have super vision). Thanks to TechCrunch intern Dan Romero for running the new model.

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Multiply, a social network with a heavy focus on sharing media with friends and family, is getting a major upgrade at 10 AM tomorrow, introducing an overhauled (and much improved) interface, extensive photo editing functionality, a fully integrated photo finishing platform.

Multiply doesn’t get nearly as much attention as bigger players like Facebook and MySpace, but it has built up a solid base of users, some of whom are giving the company a steady source of income through its premium accounts. Where other social networks like Facebook have embraced a mentality of helping users widely share their thoughts and photos, Multiply has held onto the belief that sometimes users only want to share their personal media with a handful of their good friends and family.

With the latest release, Multiply is looking to embrace the “digital mom”. Recognizing that many of the site’s members are adults looking to share their media with loved ones, the site has adopted an interface that is best described as a media inbox. When you first log in, the site presents you with a stream of content similar to Facebook’s news feed (in fact, Multiply had feeds long before Facebook did). Your friends’ newest events, messages, and photo albums appear in the main column, with thumbnails next to each.

Navigation through the new interface largely revolves around a new sidebar at the left hand side of the screen, which strongly resembles something you might see in an Email client. The panel includes links to your most important friends and family, allowing you to make sure you catch all of their latest updates. Likewise, there are filters for the site’s groups, and you can create powerful custom filters – a feature that will appeal to power users.

Aside from this feed of new items, the other main area to get an overhaul in Multiply 4.0 is the Media Locker, where you can upload and manage all of your photos, videos, and blog posts. This is where the new site really shines – Multiply 4.0’s photo manager strongly resembles native photo software like iPhoto, allowing you to drag and drop photos into whatever albums you’d like. You can use a slider to adjust how large the thumbnails appear during navigation, and the top bar includes handy links that let you quickly share albums via Email or through Multiply itself. It’s also much easier to export photos to the site’s printing storefront, which allows you to have your images printed into physical photo books, cups, and other products.

The Media Locker also includes a number of basic photo editing features, like red-eye reduction, color adjustment, and image cropping. Multiply isn’t the first social network to offer these features (MySpace launched similar tools earlier this year), but unlike the MySpace editor Multiply’s doesn’t need a Flash embed. To get your photos onto Multiply, the site offers a range of plugins for your computer’s photo software, as well as an AIR application that can monitor your folders for any new images as they are imported from your camera.

My one major gripe with the new site is the inconsistent appearance of the sidebar. While it appears and changes contextually when you’re in the Inbox or Media Locker sections, any time you visit a page or album on a friend’s profile, the sidebar vanishes. You can still get back to the other pages using the links at the top of the screen, but it’s strange for a UI element that seems persistent to disappear occasionally (imagine if Facebook’s menubar at the bottom of its pages only showed up some of the time).

Aside from that, Multiply’s new site seems solid, offering a social network that can really do your media justice. Facebook may be the web’s leading photo sharing service, and it’s great for sharing day to day photos with friends. But for those shots that really matter you can’t beat full resolution, which Facebook doesn’t offer. Multiply allows users to upload full resolution photos, with the option of paying $20/year for an unlimited amount of storage to to have them all backed up (not to mention its more extensive photo editing features). Multiply isn’t going to overtake Facebook or MySpace any time soon, but it’s doing a great job bridging the gap between photo sharing services like Flickr and the larger social networks.

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Photo-sharing on the Web keeps getting more popular as people transfer more of their digital photos from their the black holes of their computer hard drives to social networks where their friends and family can actually see them. Although Facebook Photos has emerged as the largest photo-sharing service in terms of users and is one of the fastest-growing of any size, it is still not the largest by the sheer number of images that it stores.

That honor, for the moment, goes to ImageShack, which currently hosts 20 billion images, I’ve confirmed with the company (for more background on ImageShack, read this post). Facebook holds 15 billion photos, according to a spokesperson there. But it should catch up by the end of the year. Facebook users are adding photos at a rate of 850 million photos a month, compared to 100 million photos a month by ImageShack users. Good thing Facebook just fixed its storage architecture to be able to handle the bigger load. Clarification: The numbers used in this post are for unique images. Facebook actually has 60 billion image files because it stores each image in four different sizes. But it stores 15 billion unique photos. The 20 billion Imageshack figure is also for unique images but ImageShack founder Jack Levin says that it is an estimate and there could be 10 percent duplication. The Flickr and Multiply numbers below I’ve also confirmed are unique numbers.

After Facebook and ImageShack, the third largest image warehouse on the Web appears to be News Corp’s PhotoBucket, with 7.2 billion photos. And then Yahoo’s Flickr comes in at 3.4 billion, which also includes some videos. Interestingly, coming in right behind Flickr in the photo count is social network Multiply, with 3 billion images. Multiply’s photo=sharing options are one of its main strengths, which make sit attractive to its core demographic of families and moms (an area where Facebook is still struggling). Picasa is probably up there somewhere, but Google won’t get any more specific than “billions” of photos have been uploaded “and millions of photos are uploaded every day.”

In fact, with the exception of Photobucket, none of these services publicly discloses its latest image count. I had to ask each company individually. Some companies like Shutterfly refuse to disclose their numbers, and they are a publicly traded company. I am still waiting to hear back from Kodak about KodakGallery..com, but the trend lines of these older photo storage services are not encouraging (see second chart at the bottom of the post). Below are the figures I was able to collect directly from each company:

Image Warehouses On The Web (numbers are total images stored)

ImageShack: 20 billion
Facebook: 15 billion
PhotoBucket: 7.2 billion
Flickr 3.4 billion
Multiply: 3 billion
Picasa “billions” (?)

While Google chose to be vague, Yahoo was completely transparent. It provided the following additional stats on Flickr:

Photos/videos uploaded daily: 3 million (implies 90 million a month)
Photos that are public: 50%
Photos that are tagged: 30%
Geo-tagged photos: 110 million
Number of unique tags: 38 million
Amount of traffic that comes from search engines: 75%

And Multiply shared with me the fact that its 12.5 million registered users are uploading an impressive 75 million photos a month. That comes to six photos per day per registered user, which is actually more than Facebook. Since Multiply encourages high-resolution uploads, it is handling 2.5 terabytes per day in image uploads. A little under one percent of its users, or 10,000 of them pay $20 a year for premium services such as unlimited storage and photo album backups. The one percent of premium users accounts for between 5 and 7 percent of all uploads.

If you look at comScore numbers, however, it is clear that Facebook is gaining the most usage overall, with 161 million unique visitors worldwide in February. Flickr is a distant but strong second with 76.5 million visitors. Photobucket is at 58.6 million uniques, Picasa is at 39.9 million, and ImageShack is at 33.2 million.

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Philippines-based media company ABS-CBN Broadcasting Corporation has paid $5 million for a 5% stake in Multiply, the media-centric social network with a userbase primarily composed of adults. The investment pegs Multiply’s valuation at $100 million, which is within range (though on the lower end) of our social network valuations based on past deals. ABS-CBN also has the right to purchase up to 10% of Multiply within the next two years.

Multiply has a significant presence in the Philippines, with around 3 million users. ABS-CBN plans to capitalize on its investment through advertising, and by eventually offering a mobile version of the site for users in the Philippines. For more, read the ABS-CBN announcement here.

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Multiply, a social network largely geared towards adults, has launched a new set of printing features that allow members to order professional prints of their photos directly from their online albums and those of their friends.

Available photo products include photo books, calendars, cards, and standard prints. The site uses an intuitive drag-and-drop interface to place photos, allowing users to cull shots from both their own online albums and those of their friends. Users can collaboratively put together a photo book, but are also free to copy and manipulate each album to their liking (for example, parents could work together to create a photo book of their little league team, customizing the cover of each printed book to feature a photo of their own child).

Multiply has a leg up on some of the major social networks because it has long positioned itself as a media-centric site – the site’s 10 million users have uploaded twice as many photos per capita as Facebook’s. And unlike Facebook, which only offers photo printing at the low resolutions visible on the site, all Multiply photos are stored at their original resolution. To help facilitate getting photos
onto the site, Multiply released an application earlier this year based on Adobe’s AIR platfrom that automatically uploads new photos to the social network.

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We’ve received confirmation that Microsoft is handing over the reins to its MSN Groups property to the social network Multiply. Microsoft is planning to release a new service called Windows Live Groups in November, and apparently doesn’t want to compete with itself. Oddly enough, Microsoft has chosen not to allow groups to transition between the two services, and instead is going to offer a migration tool that will allow users to take groups over to Multiply, which currently bills itself as the world’s 8th largest social network.

The rumor was originally reported earlier today after a series of emails were posted to a MSN Discussion newsgroup, and has since been confirmed by both Multiply and Microsoft through a blog post.

Here’s Microsoft’s explanation for the shutdown:

The natural question to ask in this situation is why we are closing MSN Groups. It is our goal to provide our customers with the most current and user friendly technology available today. We made the difficult decision to close the MSN Groups service as part of an overall investment in updating and re-aligning our online services with Windows Live. In the long term we believe that closing the service is the best way to continue to offer innovative, best of breed services that help you stay in touch with the people you care about. It’s very important to us that you keep the data you created using MSN Groups and that is why we have partnered with Multiply, so you can keep your group going into the future despite the closure of MSN Groups.

The Microsoft post also states that users will have until February 21, 2009 to migrate their groups over to Multiply, after which point the site will cease to exist.

This just seems weird – why would Microsoft abandon a sizable (but dwindling) chunk of users to an entirely unrelated social network? It’s nice that they aren’t leaving their users out in the cold, but why not just cut off new signups to MSN Groups and allow the legacy users to continue on in peace? Microsoft may appear to have made the gesture in good faith, but it’s likely that the company is hoping users will scoff at the idea of having to migrate, and just sign up on the new Live service when it launches.

Whatever Microsoft’s intentions, Multiply is sure to be happy with the deal, as it has just been handed millions of new users (we’re trying to contact Microsoft for the exact number).

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Multiply, a media-heavy social network geared towards adults, has introduced a new backup system that will backup users’ videos and photos at full resolution. The premium service will cost users $20 per year for an unlimited amount of storage.

As part of the new release, all users (even unpaid ones) will be given access to Multiply’s new media upload application that’s based on Adobe’s AIR platform (you’ll be able to use it on Windows, Mac, and Linux). The application will monitor designated folders on a user’s computer, and will automatically upload new photos and video in the background as soon as they’re added.

These files will be housed in an online “Media Locker”, from which users will be able to share and manipulate their media without having to wait for it to upload. Paid users will get to keep this media online in its original format indefinitely, while free users will see their content expire after 30 days, unless they share it in an album on the social network.

Given the amount of media that gets uploaded to social networks like Multiply, it’s not surprising that they’re trying to capitalize on it. But because it only backs up photos and video, it seems like a strange choice for a backup solution – users might be better off going with all-purpose backup services like Mozy or Apple’s Time Machine. Then again, if users are going to be uploading their media anyway, it’s infinitely better than nothing.

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It’s time to start comparing the big global social networks on something other than unique visitors and page views. I believe an effective way to value a particular user is based on the average Internet advertising spend per person in the country they live in. The higher the spend, the more value the social network can get out of the user by serving them advertising and other products. That means that, for now, users in a handful of key countries are worth far more in terms of revenue potential than those in the rest of the world.

We’ve begun to build out a model that looks at social network usage by country/region and compares that to available data on total Internet advertising spend in each of those countries. The model is then able to turn an apples-to-oranges comparison into an apples-to-apples comparison. The early results are surprising.

The ultimate financial value of any asset is, ultimately, what the market will pay for it. We have only a few data points to help us: Facebook, Bebo and LinkedIn are worth $15 billion, $850 million and $1 billion, respectively, based on relatively recent valuations (although only Bebo was actually sold completely; Facebook and LinkedIn raised investments at those valuations). The last valuation of MySpace was just $580 million, back in 2005 when it was acquired by News Corp.

Which valuation is most “correct?” It’s hard to say based on the data that’s been available to date, which is mostly just aggregate page view and unique visitor numbers from Comscore and other services. Based on worldwide unique visitors, for example, Facebook recently overtook MySpace to become the “largest” social network.

According to raw worldwide user number, the biggest social networks are Facebook, Myspace, Hi5, Friendster, Orkut and Bebo, in that order. But when you apply the model that we’ve created below, which takes into account where users live, the rankings change substantially. MySpace is by far the most valuable social network based on available data. A competitor like Orkut is worth only 1/20th of MySpace, even though it has nearly 1/4 the number of users.

Properly Ranking Social Networks

Our model takes Comscore data for available countries and regions. We’ve graphed each of 26 well known social networks with the data we have been able to collect. We’ve then calculated the average advertising spend (estimated by PriceWaterhouseCoopers in a recent report) for each person online in each of those countries. For example, in the U.S., the total 2008 estimated Internet advertising spend is $25.2 billion. We’ve divided that by the number of people online in the U.S. according to Comscore (191 million), to get an average Internet spend per person of $132. View the raw data and calculations here.

The U.S., by the way, is only the 4th most valuable market per Internet user, trailing The UK ($213), Australia ($148) and Denmark ($144).

We’ve then multiplied the average Internet spend per user in each market with the number of unique users each social network has in that market, essentially creating a “weighted average” based on the advertising dollars chasing users. If a social network has more users in the U.S., Japan, the UK, Germany, Australia, and other bigger advertising networks, they will have a higher weighted average valuation.

We believe this model is an effective way to rank various competing social networks. It bumps down networks like Orkut and Friendster who have tens of millions of users in markets with very little advertising spend, and bumps up networks with lots of users in higher value markets.

Based on this model, MySpace is by far the most valuable social network. Second place Facebook has just 75% of the value of MySpace (even though it now has more users), followed by Bebo (26% of MySpace value), Hi5 and Amebio. LinkedIn comes in at no. 11, at 6% of MySpace’s value.

Valuation Ranges

The real-world revenue numbers being reported for the big networks supports this approach to valuation and shows a direct tie between monetization efforts and where a network’s users are. MySpace is estimated to have generated $755 million in revenue over the last year. The (now) larger Facebook, with a far higher percentage of users in less lucrative markets, will generate just $255 million this year:

EMarketer estimates that MySpace will post $755 million in revenue in the fiscal year ending June 30. MySpace would not comment on the estimate. About a third of the revenue is expected to come from the Google ad pact. For the year, Facebook is estimated to earn $265 million in ad revenue.

Since we have three recent data points valuing social networks (Facebook at $15 billion, Bebo at $850 million, LinkedIn at $1 billion), we can start to apply valuation ranges based on the model. Facebook’s 10.2 million value points and $15 billion valuation puts a $1,467 value on each value point. LinkedIn is valued very similarly, at $1,325 per value point. Bebo, with lots of users in the rich UK market, appears to have been undervalued at only $241 per value point.

Based on these three publicly available data points we’ve created value ranges for each of the top 25 worldwide social networks. There is a very wide disparity (MySpace, for example, is worth between $3.3 billion and $20 billion, based on which comparable you look at). But it does yield very interesting data. For example, If Facebook and LinkedIn were valued similarly to Bebo, they would be worth just $2.5 billion and $182 million, respectively, far less than what their investors recently paid for a piece of them.

Interestingly, the recent sale of Polish social network Nasza-klasa for $92 million appears to be right in sync with Bebo’s price. The model estimates its value at $91 million based on Bebo’s valuation metrics.

There are some big flaws with the model and analysis in its current state. First, LinkedIn may be in a different class of network, given that all of its users are business focused (no super-poking going on there). As a result, it may be able to monetize users far better than its competitors, no matter what geographic market is being looked at. Still, we’ve decided to leave it in as a data point, with that caveat.

The model itself needs more data. The user numbers are based on April Comscore. We will shortly revise it with the May numbers, although the absolute rankings probably won’t change. More importantly, some big markets are not included yet. The Chinese Internet advertising market, for example, is estimated to be $2 billion in 2008, yet they are not included (mostly because I can’t find data on user numbers for the networks). Also, the Philippines isn’t broken out separately, again due to data availability issues (although the total Internet advertising market in the Philippines is just $3 million this year, so it won’t affect the rankings materially even though Friendster is so strong there). Finally, Russia is currently grouped with “the rest of Europe,” and needs to be separately broken out – it has a large and growing online advertising market and lots of users, so that update may affect the mid-level network rankings.

The advertising spend model is just an estimate and from a single source. I’m less concerned with this data since it doesn’t matter to the model if the estimates are absolutely correct. If the estimates are wrong by different rates in different countries, however, the model will break. If we find better relative data between countries, we’ll update the model with that data. But for now, the PriceWaterhouseCoopers data seems to be pretty good.

Finally, this model doesn’t take into account execution at the company level. Two very similar networks may monetize vastly differently based on methods of advertising and even the brute effort and passion of the employees. This model obviously doesn’t take that into account.

I also note Andrew Chen’s analysis last week which takes a similar approach to this using Google Trends data instead of Comscore. The Google data isn’t granular enough to really dig in to relative values, however, and he was lacking current and deep data on average Internet spend. Still, I agree with his methodology.

As I wrote at the very end of this post, you have to consider the current monetization value of users when comparing social networks. Raw user numbers are pointless without it.

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The service acts like a meta social network where users can collect and share content from multiple social sites (photos, video, blogs). See our earlier comparison with Vox. Users post 1.25 million photos, 16,000 videos and 55,000 blog entries daily. However, while the U.S. is home to the largest share of their registered users, most of their traffic is international.

The Philippines is one of the most pronounced examples of their large international following. Alexa ranks Multiply as the 5th largest site in the Philippines – with more than 2 million unique monthly visitors. We had earlier reported that 39% of the site’s traffic comes from the Philippines. Therefore it’s no surprise that they’ve managed to land a multi-year ad deal with one of the Philippine’s largest networks, ABS-CBN. ABS-CBN has 67 televisions stations, 19 radio stations, 30 websites and reaches 97% of the Filipinos with televisions. Under terms of the agreement, ABS-CBN interactive will sell advertising and mobile services for Multiply’s Filipino users, with the two companies sharing revenues.

The deal highlights the importance of international markets U.S. press often take for granted. Sites like Friendster and Orkut have found large international followings while their U.S. markets are dormant. With a global internet, foreign markets are expected to become even more important in the future. According to research firm Datamonitor Plc., by the end of this year, Asia will account for 35% of the world’s social networking users, with 28% of users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 25% in North America, and 12% in the Caribbean and Latin America. Once again, startups concerned about getting big may want to get international.

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As part of the deal ex-Chairman of Intermix Media (the original owners of MySpace) David Scott Carlick will join Multiply’s board.

Multiply previously took $6million Series A in July 2006.

Multiply is one of the older social networking sites (it launched in 2003) and has flown under the radar while first MySpace, then Facebook soared; we last covered the site in November 06. Whilst getting little attention Multiply has continued to grow, and at least according to Alexa is now more popular than Bebo, although lower than Orkut or Hi5. Like many of its competitors it appears to have carved out a strong presence outside of the United States, ranking in the top 10 sites visited by internet users in the Philippines (5) and Indonesia (9); 39% of the sites traffic comes from the Philippines.

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Six startups (Meebo, Meez, Multiply, Plaxo, RockYou and Technorati) who can’t afford the $2.5 million plus for a thirty second spot during the game got together to produce low-budget “SuperBowl” ads and put them on YouTube. Some of them are pretty entertaining. Others, not so much. We’ve embedded all of them below and have a poll to see which one you like the best.

By the way, last year’s real SuperBowl ads are still up on Google Video at video.google.com/superbowl.html. I assume Google will replace those ads with SuperBowl XLI ads tomorrow. Yahoo will also be hosting the actual SuperBowl ads once the games starts at Yahoo Video.

My favorite “startup” ad is Technorati, although they cheated by using footage from one of my favorite movies. Plaxo and Meebo are tied for second place.

The ads and poll are below, in this order: Meebo, Meez, Multiply, Plaxo, RockYou and Technorati:

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Now that Vox has finally launched after a long beta period and Multiply is coming out with new features and a new version, it’s a good time to ask…which one is better? If you’re looking for beautiful templates to chose between, a young hip crowd to network with and a company most likely to support emerging technology trends requested by early-adopter type users then Vox is the way to go. If you seek logical and robust privacy controls and shelter from an online world of strangers then Multiply is better designed. I prefer Multiply’s handling of media items and news feeds from your network of contacts. Vox is beautiful, Multiply is more functional.

Vox is the newest product of SixApart, owners of LiveJournal, MovableType and Typepad. Our previous Vox coverage is here. Multiply is privately owned and recently received $6 million in funding. Multiply is more than 2 years old and claims more than 3 million registered users.

Privacy Settings and Content Distribution

Privacy settings are the key issue according to both companies. Posts on Vox can be made visible to anyone, to just friends, to just family, to friends and family or just to you yourself.

Multiply allows more granular control: your friends, their friends and their friends, your family, their family and their family, your professional contacts, their professional contacts and their professional contacts, only direct contacts in either friend, family or professional contexts or only particular individuals added from contact lists importable from outside software. That’s quite a list of options and the interface makes it very workable. If you want to share something only with your family and their family, but not one more circle of family – well then I guess you’re out of luck. Sliders instead of check boxes could be useful.

Multiply says that there are many situations in which you’d like to share content with people one or two steps removed from your circle of contacts, but you don’t want to add those people to your contact list in order to do so. That makes sense to me.

In other words, if granular selective exposure is what’s important to you – Multiply is a better option than Vox.

Your Network News Feeds

The front page for Multiply users is now a feed of recent posts by friends and family. The page can be extended to include friends of friends and even further removed connections. The service uses a proprietary algorithm that includes how recently you’ve viewed someone’s posts and other factors to determine how close non-direct contacts are to you.

This My Multiply page is much cleaner and simpler than the cluttered Vox Neighborhood page and the all too similar but simpler VoxWatch page. As Facebook demonstrated, when you make the actions of friends visible on a user page – that’s something you need to do carefully. I prefer how Multiply aggregates that content, especially given that the original poster had such granular control over who it will be sent to.

A related section that displays a user’s friends uses the same algorithm to determine closeness and lets you hover over anyone’s image to see their relationship, send them a message or block them. (Example on the left.)

Media Handling

I prefer the way that Multiply works with multimedia, though there are some things like iStockPhoto integration for illustrating your writings that are nice about Vox. Both services allow users to upload photo and video from their computers or a number of online services. Vox transcodes videos, requires an annoying additional page load to view media files and I saw a big loss of quality when I tested Vox’s video handling. Multiply plays videos in Quicktime with no loss of quality but entirely outside of the original context it was posted in.

Multiply’s photo upload just got a major upgrade in version 3.0. The new Ajax uploader lets you reorder with drag and drop and quickly rotate images. It’s quite satisfying to use. Vox has better integration of photos into blog posts themselves, but the Ajax reordering in Multiply is frustratingly absent in Vox.

Multiply supports two-way cross posting with LiveJournal, Blogger, TypePad, Xanga and Windows Live Spaces. Vox only supports cross posting with LiveJournal and Typepad, both owned by SixApart just like Vox is. Multiply offers a screen saver you can download that will display the newest photos from any user you designate – that sounds like a good feature for family users.

Both services let you post by email via mobile phone, but with Vox you can get several different email addresses with different privacy settings. Mobile posting in Multiply is so bare bones I doubt it’s getting much use.

Rights Questions

Lately I’ve taken to framing questions about data export and identity standards as rights questions. I own rights on my data; I want to be able to easily and quickly take it with me from one social network to another. If I want to have a single login across those different networks and perhaps even have multiple personas (personal, professional) then I ought to be able to do so. No one is doing all of that well, but I expect consumers to demand all of it in time.

Multiply will burn you a CD with all of your data and mail it to you for $50. They say that the proof that data export isn’t something their users want is that only 1 person has taken that option in the two plus years it’s been available. I don’t consider that a very compelling argument.

Multiply also told me they were cautious about supporting Open ID standards, Yahoo! Browser Based Authentication or some other single login system because it could so easily go the way of Passport and fall into disuse. I think users should have a standards based single login as an option in addition to a native login. The company told me they were watching to see if one standard or another gains traction – but that’s what everyone says.

Some degree of persona support is available in Multiply, as I can expose some content to my family and other content to professional contacts. It would be good to be able to expose entirely different personal profiles, though.

Multiply does let me export my contacts as a CSV file. That’s a great start. Vox doesn’t support much in the way of these kinds of rights issues, but it just launched and SixApart’s Anil Dash tells me it’s all in the works. The company’s Live Journal property has been a trail blazer when it comes to ID issues. The Multiply team comes from the world of online sports sites and major media. They come from mainstream backgrounds and are targeting mainstream users. SixApart is a company of grass roots innovators, who seem to me more tied to the Web 2.0 community, and who are also targeting mainstream users with Vox. If you’re going to place bets on one of these two rolling out support for things like OpenID or microformats, Vox is the most likely to do so.

Conclusion

Both of these services, the leading privacy-centric multimedia sharing social networks, are not everything I wish they were. They are, however, both doing many things very well. Both are breaking new ground in a very young space on the web.

Both companies are likely to satisfy different kinds of customers. There are some ways they can’t be compared yet, too. For example, I love Vox’s understated advertisements. Multiply is running on VC backing and hasn’t launched a real ad strategy yet.

After looking at both of these systems in some depth, I feel all the more in agreement with the sentiment expressed in my recent interview with SixApart’s Andrew Anker – this sector is not just about MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn, there is plenty of room still for more and better social networking services.

If you are looking to share text, photos and video with some control over who can see your content – these are two services you should check out. With the launch of version 3.0, I think Multiply has taken the lead.

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Since launching in March 2004, the system has nearly 3 million registered users and recently expanded with a localized version for Japan. The company says it will use the new funds to expand features, functionality, marketing and international presence. With so many social networking sites on the web, marketing is going to be essential.

Founder and President Peter Pezaris was previously CBS SportsLine.com’s President of Operations and Product Development and oversaw operations of nfl.com, pgatour.com and cbs.sportsline.com. Transcosmos adds Multiply to a portfolio that includes Ask/Bloglines, RealNetworks, Hipcast/Audioblog, Pheedo, Edgio and others.

Multiply aims to be distinct by focusing closely on limiting interactions to people who are already connected to each other. Beyond that, though, the system has a number of interesting features like Ajax message boards and a forum organized by user attention in addition to thread update currency. The message boards display new comments on the screen of each party in a conversation in near real time and the forum will prioritize threads by whether a user has read them before – so a thread isn’t brought to the top of your view of the forum just because one of only two people who care about it has made a new post. There’s RSS all over the site and it’s got a nice feel to it.

If the new funding gets leveraged well, Multiply may be able to grab a bigger piece of the social networking pie.