MANILA, Philippines--Filipinos are prolific social networking animals.

They are globally known to burn text messaging lines, and have shown the way to "go forth and multiply" in the cyberworld.

Filipinos were recently declared the most active on some web-based social network sites.

David Jones, vice president for global marketing of Friendster, was quoted in an Inquirer report in February as saying that "the biggest percentage of users is from the Philippines, clocking in with 39 percent of the site's traffic."

Jones added in a recent INQUIRER.net interview that in March alone, Friendster recorded 39 million unique visitors, 13.2 million of whom were from the Philippines.

Comes now Multiply to bring the news that another "cyberworld" has been "conquered" by Filipinos.

Multiply is one of the world's largest multimedia sharing web sites and one of the most popular social networks in the Philippines. It has also introduced its mobile phone version.

An ad-supported website, Multiply is aiming to capture a sizeable chunk of the estimated $2-billion ad spend on social networks for this year alone.

There are now over 450 social network sites in the Internet.

Sheer numbers

Peter Pezaris, Multiply president and founder, and David Hersh, vice president of business development, are in the country for a week to launch Multiply Philippines.

It's their first visit here.

What may have prompted Pezaris and Hersh to personally oversee Multiply's local launch was simply the numbers--the sheer capacity of Filipinos to rack up downloads and uploads and create their "humongous" online traffic.

Pezaris, 38, who founded the site in 2003 with Hersh and two other college buddies, said Filipino online users of the site comprised the largest and most active group in terms of number of subscribers and of photos being uploaded daily.

Of the more than nine million registered users of Multiply, 2.2 million are Filipinos, outnumbering even nationalities with a bigger population base such as the United States, Indonesia, Malaysia and Brazil.

Of the two million photos uploaded to the site every day, one million belong to Filipinos.

Of Multiply's monthly page views of 1 billion, close to 30 percent are by Filipinos. This translates to 335 million page views a month by Filipinos alone.

Family-, friend-oriented

"The product and features that we developed really resonates with the Filipino people," Pezaris told the Inquirer on Thursday.

"Filipinos love to take pictures. And they are also a very family- and friend-oriented society, much more so than a lot of other countries. And so it's no surprise that we're so popular here," he said.

Pezaris talked about the effectiveness of advertising on social network sites at the World Marketing Conference at the SMX Convention Center in Pasay City.

Hersh characterized Multiply's Filipino users as a "little bit younger than overall age demographic."

He said 60 percent of registered users in the Philippines were women, and that women constituted 70 percent of the traffic from the Philippines.

Pezaris and Hersh told the Inquirer of Multiply's local partnership with ABS-CBN Interactive. The partnership involves a multiyear advertising and revenue-sharing agreement.

About 70 percent of Multiply's Filipino registered users are under the age of 25, ABS-CBN interactive managing director Paolo Pineda told the Inquirer.

In comparison, Filipino Friendster users are in the age range of 16-30, with 55 percent of them female.

Lifeline to home

Pezaris noted that with many Filipinos moving and living abroad, social networking sites like Multiply had become popular.

"We've heard that as much as 10 percent of the population is living outside the Philippines," Pezaris said.

He said that because of the Multiply site's focus on "real-world relationships" and "the exchange of media between people you actually know, it's a lifeline back home for a lot of Filipinos living abroad, much more so than the other networking sites where everybody is just sort of posting everything for everybody."

Multiply allows people to directly share their personal media--photos, videos, blogs and other content--strictly within their personal network, Pezaris said.

Apart from the millions of registered users, and a billion page views, Multiply gets 19,000 videos and 55,000 blog entries daily.

Meeting friends

According to Pezaris, meeting friends in Multiply.com happens the same way that one meets friends in the real world.

"Most of the time you meet new friends in the real world through friends and families you already have. You get introduced to new people from existing relationships. The same thing happens on Multiply," he said.

But unlike other social networking sites, Multiply does not provide dating services.

"We don't let you hook up," Pezaris said. "You can't do a search for 18- to 24-year-olds within a certain area with a certain interest. Those features don't exist, but a lot of people do meet each other on Multiply through trusted relationships. The same thing happens in a Filipino society."

Multiply has privacy controls built into the product even as other sites are just starting to add them, Hersh said.

"With Multiply, if you want a certain photo to be shared with just the family, you just click on the family and it's done because you specified these relationships explicitly," he said.

"It's taking a very sophisticated and powerful access control model and making it very simple so that everyday users can have that power without understanding the complexity behind it," he said.

College buddies

Pezaris and Hersh are two of the four principal members of Multiply. The other two are Michael Gersh and James Pryce.

All four men went to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 20 years ago, and founded Multiply in 2003. It is the second business site that they started together.

Multiply Inc. is based in Boca Raton, Florida. It has offices in New York City and San Francisco.