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.