Baron Josef von Kronen's posts with tag: multiply
 This is long overdue... A few weeks back, Everett, a Multiply employee, contacted me asking for my snail mail address so he could send me a Multiply t-shirt. I don't recall the exact things he said, but they were happy for what I was doing at Refugees, helping out the new members and stuff. I declined the generous folks offer, asking only for a few different shots of the shirt so I could edit my avatar in and post it on my page. I've uploaded that as my headshot. It wasn't the t-shirt, though. It was the recognition. I was ecstatic that Multiply had took notice and wanted to reciprocate. I mean, really, coming from Yahoo! where the little people in 360 stared up, gazing at the top of the Yahoo! skyscraper, trying to get some attention... and here, I was just blown away by this. The whole thing that still perplexes me is that, truthfully, I'm really not that helpful of a guy in real life, especially at work. I have always been pretty quick to pick things up, and subconsciously I expect others to, so I often get irritated when people ask for help for things that I think they should know how to do. I believe that I have another facet of my personality that makes up for that. I can't stand to see people do things wrong or inefficently. If you are struggling to do something, I'm the type of person that comes in, and says, " No, that's wrong, do it this way next time. It'll work better, trust me," in an annoyingly brusque manner. That's why I often find myself pondering why. What possessed me to start Refugees when five of my friends had set up accounts here to scope the place? What made me spread the word through my friends and ask them to ask their friends? What made the group successful, in my eyes, and why am I still doing it? This type of thing is uncharacteristic for me... perhaps this is an example of how time online blends into things in real life. Ze Baron 
Folks, I'll have you know I'm still plenty alive. This last week was a little busy and I forsee this next week being rather stressful, so I'm not sure how much time I'll have to blog. I'll try to make it around and comment, though, as usual. I've got a small piece of good news... I bought a new computer. I'm going to keep running this one until it wakes up dead one morning. They new one is a really fancy (and hence, rather expensive) one for the baronly things that I do. That, and it has all sorts of fancy gagets to play my games in exquisite detail. Speaking of which, I order the damn thing on Wendesday and got an email they shipped it on Thursday. Saturday I come home, check the order status, and find that there was an "Unsuccessful Delivery Attempt." I went outside and looked around, and FedEx had stuck one of those "We tried, but you weren't home to sign" stickers to my door and I hadn't even seen it. Today it's Sunday, so they aren't running, and it says they don't do home delivery on Mondays! Now I have to wait until Tuesday. I hope that sticker is wrong and I get my PC tomorrow. Anyway, yes, that's about it, folks. Also, if you haven't seen it, Multiply has done some renovations. Check that out here. -Ze Baron
I was reading the Multiply Blog and I came across this. I found it another interesting thing that Multiply is doing. Click here for... "Wanna Win A Webcam?"Before anyone asks... no, I don't need a webcam, and no, I don't have a webcam so I can't endorse anyone. Since I'm making plugs... if any of you have not yet joined Y!360 Refugees, my Multiply group here, you might find it very helpful. It has a bunch of experienced users (over 1900 at last count) and you can find updates about the goings on at Multiply (updates, new features, etc) there. HERE is the site. Check it out. Besides, I'm the mod! ;D And also, regarding the PM I sent (I hope everyone got it), you can invite your friends to the party as well. Here's an excerpt from the PM:
Well, as it happens, Giles Conway and myself were talking about our Christmas plans, and he and I decided to co-host a ball this year. It is going to be December 28, 2007, at 9:00 PM EST. Everyone is invited, along with their friends. Please feel free to post this on your page and invite your friends, and their friends, and whoever wants to come. Traditionally these have been blowout parties, and those of you that have came before, you know what it's like.Now, of course, Giles suggested this be a formal ball, so men, find a nice tux, and ladies, grab your best evening gown. And of course, you can come with your virtual dates. Virtual dates aren't romantically involved, it's all good fun, so come with whomever you choose. I'm going to have to ask two favors from all of you.
Please RSVP at this link: http://zebaron.multiply.com/calendar/item/10003. If you RSVP and later can't come, that's fine, and if you don't RSVP and do come, that's fine too. The second favor is that I'd like you all to bring a food or drink. Go online, find a nice dish or drink, get the HTML for it, and then paste it into the special food and drink blog. Multiply is wonderful... you can add the HTML for your dish in a comment! We could never do that on 360. Plus, the comments update instantly, so we won't have to refresh all the time!
And ladies... I don't have a date yet! hehehe... -Ze Baron
 | LURKING | Nov 22, '07 1:14 AM
for everyone |
I don't know if any of you guys noticed, but when you go to a page, the owner of that page can see who all came to that page. They get a history, complete with headshots and hyperlinks. While this is typically benign -- I see that a bunch of people read this blog and didn't comment, or that or whatever. I suppose it's a harmless feature. The difference is that on 360 you could lurk with no consequence.
Some days when I'm out scoping people out, without commenting (I don't do it often,) I'll get a "Thanks for coming by my page" or a "You came by my page but were pretty quiet" comment. I HATE that with a passion and a fury!! If I wanted them to know that I came to their page, I'd've bloody said something! Sometimes I'm just getting music, sometimes I'm scoping out members of Refugees to see their pages, etc... it just drives me nuts. I don't care if they see that I've been there, but don't thank me for coming when all I did was look at the page.
Today I got the most rude invite... they said (paraphrase) "You came to my page for a download... at least you could invite" or something like that. I know for a fact that, unless they changed their music sections, I did not go to their page!
This really, really, really drives me bonkers. I don't hunt down every passer-by who stops in for a read. I don't think anyone should... it's almost like disrespecting people's privacy.
I think I've officially found my Multiply pet peeve.
-Ze Baron
Well... I'm amazed again.
I sent a letter a few days ago to the Multiply Customer Service (CS) asking them if they could help me out. I changed the logo for Y!360 Refugees a week or two back, but it still had not changed on the user's page to the new logo. After about three days (now today) I got a reply:
"Hi Baron,
We're having a look into the cause of this issue, and will let you know when it's been corrected. In the meantime, I'm sorry for any inconvenience this might cause.
If you have any further questions, please let us know.
Roy"
I was a little disappointed by this, and I sent a letter to the friend who suggested I contact CS. I said I was a bit disappointed, but at least they were looking into it. She told me to keep watching the problem and that it could be fixed soon. I went and checked on my page... and lo and behold, the new logo was there! Whoo-hoo!
If you cannot see the new logo on your page, the CS rep told me you may have to clear your cache.
Alexa.com is a reputable website that tracks the hits of other web sites, usually community-oriented pages. Right now, Yahoo.com is at the top of the leaderboard, where it's been for quite some time. Google.com, YouTube.com, Live.com, and MSN.com fall in behind it to round out the top five. MySpace.com, Facebook.com, and Wikipedia.org follow them. You can find the top 20 HERE.
I decided to check some things out. I went and looked up Multiply.com. You can find the results for that HERE.
 Notice in mid-October, after a small decline, Multiply suddenly got a lift, and is continuing to lift. What happened in mid-October? The Y!360 Team blew us off with their apathy and announcement of 360’s closing. This is when the people started fleeing… myself included. The average user visited 15.4 unique pages whilst on Multiply. This is the graph for yahoo.com. Realize that it is not the graph for 360.yahoo.com, since 360 is a portal of Yahoo’s and cannot be counted separately via Alexa. The page for Yahoo! can be found HERE.  Notice that there is a hump there in early- to mid-October where Yahoo!’s traffic slumped off. Yahoo! had a 1% decline in page views over the last three months. Multiply had a 3% gain. I doubt that the fleeing of refugees touched Yahoo!’s traffic, but it appears we certainly did Multiply’s. It also says that 47% of visitors to Yahoo! go to mail.yahoo.com. 13% go to search.yahoo.com. 5% go to 360.yahoo.com. These are the top three portals, mind you! It’s also amusing: 1% of Multiply users go to customizedthemes.multiply.com. That must be one big group! HERE is an article from techcrunch.com, showing page hits for social sites. It lists them in order of growth. Topping the charts is Imeem.com, followed by aim.com, digg.com, facebook.com, and flickr.com. Xanga.com is at the bottom. You guessed it: Yahoo! 360 is the second last, losing 51% of it’s traffic over the last year. In 9/06, 360 had 5,697,000 unique visitors. In 9/07, 360 had 2,774,000 unique visitors. That probably sealed it’s fate for Mr. Yang, even though 360 was the third most-visited portal of Yahoo!. The Multiply team has announced a major upgrade for security/privacy. To read about it, go HERE. This should help people fix their settings sweepingly as opposed to doing it one by one. Well, that’s all I’ve got to say – except, if you haven’t joined Y!360 Refugees, and you’re a refugee, I’d suggest you do so, pronto! There is plenty of help and a warm community of similarly displaced users. (Of course, who am I to tout it? I’m the founder!) -Ze Baron
I tried something new tonight. I went over to Blogger, owned by Google, and activated my account. Since I have a Google account for Google Talk and GMail (yes, I'm avoiding Yahoo!), all I needed to do was activate the blogger portion. The reason I did this was for my own sense of mind and to test out a feature of Multiply that 360 did not have.
I'm going to be mirroring, or cross-posting, all of my new posts. That means that whatever I post over there (nothing) will post here, and whatever I post here should post there. That way, I'll have a back-up and an archive. It's just extra precautions.
Hopefully, this post will mirror to Blogger. We'll see.
My page over there is nothing much, but if you want to visit me, I'm at zebaronjosef.blogspot.com. Anything "better" was already taken, oddly enough. I'll get back to you guys through a blog if this is successful.
Hopefully I'll have more blogs for you this coming week.
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