THAT'S SERVICE

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!

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 pe

ople 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