Hidden gems of the interweb

Multiply.com

Online storage solutions seem to be cropping up left right and centre at the moment, meaning us casual users have an abundance of locations to upload our mod photos or home-made DRM-free music. Whilst most people have defaulted to sites such as Photobucket, Fileshack and any of the plethora of blogging sites to share their personal media, none of these websites have handled the task quite as well as Multiply.com. Although technically a social networking site like Myspace and Bebo, Multiply has solved the age old problem of integration between different services.

Whilst offering the usual capabilities of adding blog entries, pictures, music and videos, you don’t have to have all the media saved on your computer to do anything with it. Multiply uses a clever mix of ActiveX uploaders and Java applets to let you source media from any popular website on the interweb and add it all to your multiply account.

For example, go to add a photo and as well as being able to simply drag and drop files into the target box as if in Windows, you’re also provided with a list of sites including Flickr and Windows Live Spaces where you can login to your accounts and grab photos for your Multiply account. Likewise, video can be copied across from YouTube or Google Video (which are separate entities at the time of writing), and with unlimited storage space you don’t have to worry about picking out only the best files to share.

As I said previously, Multiply happens to be a social networking site, so as well as sharing the files you’ve uploaded, you also get a personal website to share them through. One of the things I love about the site is the way it has taken advantage of the multitude of web standards out there. You can track you friends’ accounts using RSS, change the look of your site using an array of nice-looking templates, and even upload your own custom style sheet using the CSS option. Once you’ve done all this, Multiply will let you invite others to the site through external contact lists, meaning you can simply chose contacts from your Hotmail or Gmail account to invite and not have to type in everyone’s email address to send the emails out.

Yet another ‘fancy’ feature is the Multiply screensaver, which will grab images from you and your friends’ accounts and turn them into a slideshow automatically. Like with many of the services I’ve looked at in this article, there’s simply too much to fit into the space of a few paragraphs, but it’s quite easy to understand after using Multiply for a few minutes how good a website it really is. Although it may not have the customer base of Myspace, it certainly makes up for it in style and substance and won’t make your browser crash due to some 14 year-old placing 20 videos all on one page.

Conclusion

With so much discussion going on regarding the future of the internet (heck, apparently there’s such thing as Web 3.0 already), the social-networking and user-generated-content based sites that are cropping up at the moment are likely to be the foundations for the next phase of our browsing experience.

As the sites above have proved, so much information is now available at our fingertips a three year old could easily take over the world given enough willpower. Content isn’t controlled by big dotcom entrepreneurs anymore - they simply provide the space for the rest of us to do it. Services and applications are swiftly replacing the desktop, and the next couple of years are going to get really interesting.