Ending Multiply relationship

A few weeks ago I did receive a notice from Multiply Multiply HQ in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Image via CrunchBase

It can well be that most of us are probably aware that Multiply’s mission has evolved over the past year and a half to become one the biggest and most beloved ecommerce marketplace in two very exciting markets, Indonesia and the Philippines.

As Multiply’s focus has shifted, they have reviewed all of their operations, and made some decisions that will affect everyone on the Multiply Community.

• From December 1st, they will unfortunately no longer be able to support Multiply in its current form – notably they will be removing the social networking and content sharing part of Multiply (photos, videos, blogs, social messaging, etc.).
  You can imagine this creates for many a big problem, because they wrote and placed many photographs on that platform.
  They have decided to discontinue providing and hosting their services, as they have concluded that other Internet sites who are committed to social networking services will do a better job serving us than they can.
  Their choice made me to look out for an other medium and because I got the impression that Word Press is the best service for bloggers with not many means and/or with more difficult subjects. For that reason I started this weekend September the 22nd 2012 with my first posting on my own pages at WordPress.
• For Multiply existing users of social networking features, Multiply promises to be willing to prove easy ways for us to either download our stuff (photos, blogs, content, etc), or to migrate it to other online services. They’ll announce the precise details shortly they said already some time ago, but I still did not get any more information how to get my texts automatically to an other webservice.
  I would like not to loose all my previous writings, though it might be not so many, as usual bloggers present. But I have the attitude just to write everything straight into the system, not saving anything in Wordfiles or the like on my old computer, with very limited space.
  I sincerely do hope they shall not let all the multiply bloggers in the cold. You can imagine how eagerly I wait to get my previous writings to transfer directly to WordPres or at least to be able than to download, migrate my content to somewhere, so that it does not get deleted.

Can you imagine how disruptive this news was, and how I did not yet nearly panicked.

Naturally, as usual I do understand that ultimately this was a business decision, critical to their to success moving forward.

For Multiply it is naturally fine that they can  pursue their own mission to give the 350 million consumers in Indonesia and the Philippines a great way to buy and sell items online. Their singular focus now is for Multiply to retain its status as a vibrant e-commerce destination in Southeast Asia in the years ahead.

Though I did not like so much the bad news of having the Blog service coming to an end, I do hope they soon wil come with a solution for the transfer and wish them all the best with their new venture.

I have been a happy user of the Multiply community over the past eight years (after the ending of MSN Groups).

Image via CrunchBase

Looking forward to meeting other people on Word Press and being able to share many thoughts, I wish everybody welcome who finds the way to this new place.

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