Reviewing ipernity.com

As of Apr 9, 2013 ipernity.com has been totally revamped. Accordingly, this review is no longer valid since I've not checked out the new site and have no plans to do so.

Today I see staff from the ipernity website spamming the benefits of their site in multiple group posts on Multiply. If you've never heard of ipernity, they are another entry in the already oversaturated category of social networking sites. Yeah, I know the guy is just sensing a business opportunity but there are better ways to go about spreading the word than resorting to classless spam. Since he so obviously wants attention for his site I thought I'd give him some. Frankly I wasn't impressed.

The first thing I noticed was the "beta" tag. Sorry, been there done that with Y! 360° and not really inclined to go there or do that again. I thought I'd look around to see what they offered but I could find nothing on the site showing what was possible, what tools they offered, which features were available, not a single thing. The only options were to search content, groups and user or to "explore" by visiting the latest posts or those posts myseriously deemed as "hot", some of which had no comments and little if any visits. But "hot". Mmmmkay... I could see some of what other people did, but still had no idea what I could do.

By now I was pretty disinterested but without actually creating an account and going through the motions I'd never know for sure what the site has to offer. So I joined. Then I clicked just about everything for awhile to see how it worked, eventually posting some content. While I may not know the place backward, forward and inside out I think I managed to get a pretty good idea of how it works. It's no Multiply, not even close.

Part of what makes Multiply so great and so different from almost everything else are the endless customization possibilities. You can change anything and everything on Multiply with all the various page options, layout options and most importantly to me, Custom CSS. By comparison ipernity has very little to offer in this department, You can change the page background color and image although you have no control of the image position or tiling. You can change background colors for the left (widest) and right sides of the content area on your page, and the text colors. That's it. If customization is a must for you then ipernity is not an option.

However, if you're primarily interested in blogging you may like ipernity a lot. Aside from the title and content of your blog you can add an introduction which appears between the title and the content, and the intro allows basic customization via a small toolbar. Their WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor is really nice and includes a bunch of stuff not available in Multiply's sadly lacking blog compose toolbar. For example, ipernity allows you to embed any photo, video or audio file that you've previously uploaded with just a couple clicks (no new pageloads and copying of links required), and you can also embed from outside sources. There's a table creator to allow for easy creation of HTML tables. You can easily add an assortment of non-alphanumeric characters like the copyright symbol, some fractions, the Euro symbol, etc.., Another great feature is that you can compose in HTML including the use of inline CSS. Privacy controls are good, they are multi-tiered so you can control who can read the post, who can comment and who can add tags. One HUGE plus is the button that expands the editor to full screen. Another great option is the ability to schedule your blog post, you can specify exactly when it gets published. Overall, thumbs up for the blogging aspect of ipernity.

One drawback to their blogs? You can not attach a document nor any other file like you can in Multiply. You can upload such files to your documents but the only way you can share it is to add it to an Album then publish it that way. From there other users can download the document to their own computer, depending upon your privacy settings of course. That seems rather counter intuitive since most people generally consider an album as something containing media (usually photos), not as something which would contain a document. However at least it does allow for sharing documents fairly easily without requiring use of embed codes from a third party site.

Then we get to media sharing. Oy. If you like Flikr you'll love ipernity. Unfortunately, I don't. It's ugly, more complicated than it needs to be, time consuming, non-intuitive and generally annoying to work with. Sadly, ipernity looks and behaves exactly like Flikr when it comes to photos. ;A huge and rather silly turn-off for me is that ipernity will only allow 5 uploads at a time when adding to or creating an album. So to add 50 photos to an album you'll have to sit and wait for the upload process 10 times. No, I'm not kidding. It's ridiculously inefficient. Any photos you upload in portrait orientation will be flipped sideways, you'll have to edit them to rotate the sideways images so they display properly. There's a setting to automatically rotate such images but it didn't work for me.

Once you've managed to navigate your way through the album creation process and have finished your edits you'll need a nap, or lunch. Viewing them is nice, though. The viewer has the option of using the ugly Flikr look-alike method, or they can choose a slideshow (with settings, woot!) or the increasingly popular lightbox view. One more item of note here, it appears that you can put multiple media types into an album, something Multiply never offered. You could create an album containing both videos and photos although I didn't create then view one to see how it displayed. Something available at ipernity which was removed from Multiply some time ago is the ability to order prints of photos. Last but not least, and this is a majorly huge drawback, ipernity places a monthly upload limit of only 200MB on free accounts. I have uploaded 29 rather large photos, a few smaller ones, a 90 second video shot at low resolution and a tiny word document while experimenting with the site, those accounted for one half of my monthly allotment. In the course of one day just playing around to test out the site I used half of my total monthly upload allowance. Not good. If you're going to upload any significant quantity of media on a regular basis you will absolutely have to fork out $30 for a Pro account.

Video playback was horrid. Even a small video shot at only 480p resolution took ages to buffer so it could play, and it did so on a connection I had just clocked at 8.6Mbps. That's horrible. Even more annoying, when playback reached the end of the buffered portion the player pauses instead of just resuming playback automatically as happens just about everywhere else on the internet, forcing you to once again hit the Play button. The only way around this is to sit there twiddling your thumbs while waiting for the majority of the video to buffer as indicated by the progress bar in the player. Hopefully that isn't typical of the site, maybe I caught them at a bad time.

You can also upload audio files. I've not yet done so due to the fact that I'm quickly burning through my upload allotment for the month so I don't know how well they play back or how they are presented. I'll get to them in a few days hopefully. Of course the same copyright restrictions apply there as would apply anywhere, if it isn't yours or you don't have the necessary permission to post it, thereby sharing it, then you risk disciplinary action. Not to mention massive lawsuits from the RIAA.

A few general observations

• Uploading: ipernity has numerous upload options, many of them very nice, including a java uploader. They also have an uploader you install to your computer which functions much like Multiply's auto-uploader. These are all a huge convenience which should allow you to work around the 5-at-a-time issue previously mentioned by uploading everything first then creating the album.
• Navigation: Pretty straightforward and intuitive for the most part. Tasks and tools are linked right at the top of the page in the header and there are many more at page bottom.
• How you see your page looks like almost nothing like how others see it. For example, I don't even see my photo album displayed when I look, but when signed out (and presumably when signed in as another user) it shows clear as day.
• Their version of Premium is 50% more expensive, $30/yr instead of $20. Not horrible by any means but a significant increase from what we're used to here on Multiply and it offers less for the higher price. ipernity Pro doesn't remove ads from the entire site, you'll still see them everywhere but your own page. Pro increases your video upload size max to 500Mb each but even that is still half of what Multiply's Premium offers.
• Privacy Controls: Pretty good, actually. Posts can be limited to Family, Friends, or made Public. Comments can be limited to yourself, Family & Friends, your Network or Everyone, as can the ability to tag.
• Big red flag for me: beta. I don't know the size of the user base at ipernity nor do I know the amount of traffic they're accustomed to. However, given the beta status I'd not be surprised if they're totally unprepared for a mass exodus of Multiply users. Should you choose this site, or any lesser known and lesser used site, expect issues until they adapt. Not so much now, but I expect they'll become more noticeable as Dec 1 approaches. Slow page loads, incomplete uploads, site crashes, etc... will probably be the norm but I'd expect that anywhere when there's a sudden increase in bandwidth use, especially one caused by mass uploading of media files.

Overall I think it's more suited to bloggers than anyone else. Those people who are primarily interested in sharing media content will probably find it a suitable replacement as well once they've become accustomed to the interface. If customizing your site is a priority than ipernity is not for you, it's just too limited. I think that pretty well covers it, if I remember anything that I missed here I'll come back and add it. You can check out the mess I made over there at http://ipernity.com/home/sarcastik1. 

I've linked to this post in a comment to one of the ipernity staff's spammish comments in MUDS, perhaps they'll see it and have something to say. Any clarification or explanation would be welcome. I've also left a comment on the Multiply page they used to post their advertisements. Something tells me I won't get a reply.