MSN Groups made the February closing official, with announcements at the top of every MSN Group, and created a page for helping Groups ease over to Multiply. The migration utility is now available, and a lot of Group owners have questions.

Ever since I heard about the closing, I’ve been looking for a new home for my two Thunderbirds groups. Several people have been giving me suggestions, and I’ve checked into a couple of them. But today, I looked into the official destination. I joined Multiply. Joining gave me a personal page, and with that, I created a sort of personal group.

There seems to be a way to change backgrounds and colors – kind of like LJ, in a way. I can put pictures into the Welcome section, and have separate albums for the various pictures. Found out, however, that though there will be photo albums transferred, the actual photos won’t be. They’ll have to be uploaded from my computer – Multiply doesn’t have an uploader function that will work with MSN (yet). In the case of one of my Groups, and its background site, I’ll have to download the pictures to my computer and upload to either the site itself, or to photobucket. Some of my graphics are at photobucket already, but a lot aren’t. And to add them to the pages, you have to use HTML. Not a problem for me, but for my assistant managers? Might be.

From the comments at the Multiply Migration help site, the messageboards are a mess when they import over. I’m half tempted to import one of my sites anyway and see how much of a mess it is, then decide whether or not to keep it.

I’m still of the opinion that starting from scratch at a new site of my own will be better. But I promised I’d wait to see what Windows Live Groups has to offer. And I’ll keep poking around at Multiply – I do want to give it a fair shake.

At least I’m not at AOL…