We’re passionate advocates of opening up the Social Web, and have been working hard on a number of initiatives in support of that vision (including OpenID, microformats, OpenSocial, consolidated online identity, and the Social Graph API). Today, we are pleased to add another (really exciting one) to the list: Google’s just announced “Friend Connect.” And we’re announcing that Plaxo will become a “Social Graph Provider” in support of this bold initiative to “socially-enable any webpage.”

What is a Social Graph Provider, you may ask? It’s any social network that elects to let its users take their “friends list” with them to use all over the open Social Web. We assert that this is a critical missing piece at the center of a “services layer” for the emerging Social Web ecosystem:

The above chart shows all the parts, and how we see them fitting together. At the center is the user, with ownership and control of their data – and the freedom to take it with them, wherever they go. At the edge is a large and growing number of socially-enabled websites. In between, are a set of services that take friction out of the process for using yet-another social site:

• Identity Providers give users access to a new site without having to create a new username/password pair. (Example: Yahoo’s implementation of OpenID.)
• Social Graph Providers give users a way leverage their existing relationships, instead of manually re-creating them all over the place. (Announced examples: Plaxo Pulse, Orkut, MySpace and Facebook.)
• Content Aggregators give users a place to see what their friends are creating and sharing all over the Social Web. (Examples: Plaxo Pulse, FriendFeed, and a long and growing list, and recently, Facebook.)

As these elements evolve in the coming months, we expect to see lots of good things happening at socially-oriented sites of all sizes. But what if you could tap the power of this new service layer without having to directly interface with any of its elements? What if you could simply sprinkle in a few lines of javascript, and make any webpage social? That is awesome promise of Friend Connect.

A lot more to come
In line with this vision of a Social Web ecosystem, we’ve been working for a while toward becoming a Social Graph Provider. So, when Google approached us to collaborate on Friend Connect, we saw the perfect opportunity to turbocharge our effort. There’s still a bunch of work to be done, but at launch, the intent is to enable you to access your full address book or any subset of Pulse connections (family, friends, business network) on any Friend Connect page or site. Down the road, we intend to let you tell us which relationships are strong enough that you’d like to have them available to you elsewhere, without having to be asked to reconnect.

For now, we’re really excited to see how quickly all this is coming together. 2008 is really becoming “the year of data portability,” and the year in which we collectively evolve beyond the “walled garden” model of social networking.

John McCrea
VP of Marketing

One of the best features of Plaxo Pulse (and other sites that do social content aggregation) is the ability to have discussions (via comments) about the items being shared. A link to an interesting article, recent photo, YouTube video, Yelp review, tweet, etc. is often the jumping-off point for a rich discussion amongst people who all know and care about each other. In such cases, the comment thread is often far more interesting than the original item that sparked it. Some of these discussions happen privately between mutually connected friends or family members; others are public discussions about public content, but filtered through the people you know, rather than what everyone on the net has to say (look at the comment stream for any YouTube video, and the signal-to-noise issue is obvious).

Most of the time, this system of comments inside aggregators works quite well. But one place where it's never felt quite right is when someone shares their public blog, which also has its own comment stream on the blog's website. In such cases, the conversation can too easily become "fractured", as some people read and post comments on the blog's web site, and others do the same inside an aggregator, but with a different set of comments. Whereas a separate comment thread can be an asset in the case of private or "noisy" content as mentioned above, many blog authors would prefer to maintain a single thread of comments, no matter where their post gets viewed. This issue has been brought up periodically since the early days of Pulse, and it recently saw a resurgence of fervent debate in the blogosphere.

Plaxo's mantra is always to "give our users control", so naturally we're in favor of letting blog authors share their feed inside Pulse and providing a way for comments generated inside Pulse to flow back to the original blog. The problem is, there's no standard way of programmatically interacting with the comment system on an arbitrary blog. So while it's never been our aim to "trap comments" inside Pulse, there hasn't been a good way to set them free. Until now.

Starting today, we've integrated Pulse with a cool startup called Disqus that makes a "smart comment system" plug-in that works with most popular blog software. If you install Disqus to run the comments on your blog, in addition to their standard improvements like threaded comments, rating comments, verifying commenters, integrated forums, and more, you can now also choose to have any blog comments posted inside Pulse also show up on your original blog. This is possible because Disqus provides a common platform with APIs that let blog authors tell Pulse where their blog comments live, and lets Plaxo automatically syndicate any comments posted inside Pulse. So if you write a blog, now you can have the best of both worlds--more people can find and comment on your blog posts using tools like Pulse, and yet you can maintain a single thread of comments for everyone.

Hooking up disqus comment syndication when sharing a blog inside Pulse

Comments posted inside Pulse will then also show up on the original blog post

If you haven't yet shared your blog inside Pulse, now is a great time to set it up. [If you're not already running Disqus on your blog, they have an easy wizard to help you set it up, and it works with most popular blog software, including MovableType, TypePad, Blogger, Tumblr, and self-hosted wordpress, though sadly not yet hosted wordpress blogs on wordpress.com, since they don't let you run JavaScript in plugins.] Then when you hook up your blog to Pulse, you just check "I use Disqus for my blog's comments" and fill in your disqus forum URL (e.g. for my blog http://josephsmarr.com, my associated disqus forum url is josephsmarr.disqus.com). [If you're already sharing your blog inside Pulse, you can click to edit your existing feed and then add your disqus forum url.] Now when anyone sees one of your blog posts inside Pulse and goes to comment, they'll be notified that any comments posted inside Pulse will also appear as a comment on your original blog post. And when they do leave a comment, it will show up on in your disqus-powered comment thread soon afterwards, and without you or them having to do anything. Disqus will notify you of a new comment just as if they'd commented directly on your blog, and similarly the commenter's name, email, and webpage will be automatically filled in along with the comment.

We're excited about this new ability to keep discussions shared across an open social web. It's one more step on the path away from walled gardens and toward a world in which users are empowered because their data is portable. If you're a blogger, give it a try and let us know what you think!

--Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect

PS: If you have any feedback on this integration--or anything else about Plaxo--let us know (using the disqus-powered comments on this blog post, of course--whether you're reading this on our website or from inside Pulse!).

UPDATE: Check out the post from our vp of marketing, John McCrea, on this topic.

Ever since the launch of the beta version of Pulse, we’ve been adding features at a rapid pace, often on a weekly release cycle. We’ve kept the service in beta all these months, because we’ve known that we were still missing some really important pieces. Chief among those was a member directory that would let you search for people by name. Indeed, “People Search” has been one of our most requested features in surveys, focus groups, and usability testing.

Today, we open then doors on that new capability. Connecting to your friends and colleagues who use Plaxo just got a whole lot easier.

In order to protect the privacy of our 20 million members, we’ve made the process of joining the directory strictly opt-in, with the ability to opt-out at any time.

Going the opt-in route is great for protecting privacy, but it does mean that People Search will start from a relatively small base – and then get better over time. So, please be patient, while the number of people who have opted in grows over time.

John McCrea
VP of Marketing

Back in November, shortly after the announcement of OpenSocial, I wrote a post about how making Pulse an open social network (rather than a “walled garden”) was good for our business. I included a chart that became the talk of the industry (coverage included TechCrunch, CNET, Valleywag, and even the New York Times). At SXSW, I became aware of just how many people had taken notice of the chart, when conversation after conversation down there eventually turned to: “Hey, about that open social growth chart…what’s the real story? What’s been happening since?”

So, I thought it was time for an update. The original chart showed a dramatic change in the rate at which the Pulse social graph was wiring itself up -– a "Great Inflection" point exactly coincident with the announcement of Google’s OpenSocial initiative on October 30, 2007. The biggest question raised by many at the time was, “Is that a sustainable change of slope or just a temporary PR-driven surge?” That question is even more relevant today, as we now know the OpenSocial story has taken a few months of development to solidify, and that we are just now starting to see full rollout on sites like MySpace. (We’re planning our own rollout in Q2.)

Well, I am pleased to announce that the trend that got kick-started with a PR surge did, indeed, end up sustaining. People liked what they saw when they came to Pulse, and the pace of establishing family, friend, and business connections has held remarkably steady. Here’s the latest Pulse social graph “hockeystick” chart, showing a continued meteoric rise from just 1 million connections in early November to over 7 million connections as of last week!

And, to be clear, these 7 million-plus connections are a new breed, an alternative to the model that forces all relationships to be described as “friends”. Every single connection in Pulse has a category, such as family, friend, or business. It’s what we think of as a “true social graph,” built up from the real who-you-know foundation of users’ unified address books. So, here’s a first peek at what happens when you give users a permission model for selectively sharing content, based on category of relationship:

When you give users choice in this area, the social graph that emerges begins to look like the real world. That is the real world of our demographic, which is the post-college crowd, centered on the 25 to 55 year olds. For that crowd, the largest slice of the pie derives from interactions out in the world: the set of people they currently work with, or worked with in the past, accounting for 75% of all connections. It is also interesting to note that when people have choices other than "friend," the word friend gets back its meaning; here we see just 20% of connections being labeled as real friends. And the group that for many is the most important, is by definition, the smallest – your family, representing here just 3% of the total connections.

We really believe that we are on the cusp of the next major phase of the Internet, a phase we call the “Social Web.” We are thrilled to see the major players actively working together on issues of data portability, implementing support for OpenID (Yahoo!) and microformats, coming together on application portability via OpenSocial, and creating innovative building blocks, like Google’s Social Graph API. We have been encouraged by the groundswell of support for the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web and for the concepts of data portability, in general.

For example, ReadWriteWeb, an influential blog, recently wrote:

“Securely moving your data around the web has increasingly become an important concept on the web. Arguably, it was the most discussed meme at this year's SXSW. While not an application, you could say it has been 'this year's Twitter'."

And here's a relevant video clip, featuring Joseph Smarr on the Portable Social Networks panel at SXSW, addressing the notion that open grows the pie; that this is not a zero-sum game:

Also, if you haven’t see Forrester analyst Charlene Li’s presentation at the recent Graphing Social Patterns conference, I highly recommend taking at look. The slides she used are here. Her thesis is that “social” will become such a natural part of the open Web, that social networking will become “like air.”

In other words, “open” is not just good for business – it is the natural way of the Web. And it's proving to be the case that the "air" Charlene talks about is wind in our sails.

John McCrea
vp of marketing

For users and developers that care about opening up the social web, one of the key building blocks for establishing a durable and portable online identity is OpenID. Recently the excitement and adoption of OpenID has skyrocketed, with Yahoo! providing OpenIDs for their entire userbase, Google's Blogger both providing and consuming OpenIDs, and several large organizations joining the OpenID foundation. Coupled with the security and usability enhancements added to the OpenID 2.0 spec late last year, it seems that OpenID is really going mainstream.

With the great progress made on the technical (privacy and security) aspects of OpenID and the increased adoption by mass-consumer companies, the user experience of OpenID is increasingly a topic of focus. There's a user-education hurdle to get used to the idea of logging into a site using an account you already have elsewhere, and the experience of bouncing between sites and attaching an OpenID can be jarring. An exciting aspect of Yahoo's approach to OpenID was trying to push the technology itself "under the hood" so users just see a friendly "Sign in with your Yahoo! ID" button and are taken to a familiar Yahoo login page. Now a new startup called clickpass, which is launching today, is taking things even further with their magic one-click signin button that removes the back-and-forth dance entirely, and integrates with a number of popular OpenID providers and consumers--now including Plaxo.

When you go to sign into Plaxo, you'll now see the distinctive orange clickpass button under the "Other ways to sign in" section (alongside our other OpenID integration points). The first time you click it, it will take you to a setup screen on clickpass's site that asks you to log into Plaxo if you already have a Plaxo account, or if you're new to Plaxo, you can sign up for a Plaxo account using your clickpass OpenID (no need to create a separate Plaxo password). Thereafter, when you come to Plaxo and click on the clickpass button, you're immediately signed into Plaxo. That's it, just one click.

It's now definitely the quickest and easiest way to sign into Plaxo, especially when you're on a different computer that doesn't remember your saved passwords. And what's cool is that you can hook up clickpass to a bunch of the sites you use, so you just log into clickpass and get one-click access to all the sites you've attached. And that first-time merge/signup page you get when using a new site is always the same, since it's hosted by clickpass. So the idea is that users should quickly learn how to sign into any site that supports clickpass, since the button is recognizable, the user flow is always the same, and the whole process is designed by a company that's primary focus is OpenID usability. Hopefully this will also encourage more sites to start consuming OpenIDs, since now there's a stronger case to be made that it's something mainstream users can understand and benefit from. There's still more work to be done on OpenID technology and usability of course, but this is a major step forward.

The internationalization and localization of social networking sites poses a different set of challenges from the globalization of other types of software products. Yes, we still start by generalizing the software so it can accept other character sets, cultural standards and UI languages (internationalization can be seen as a generalization exercise). But localization of a social networking site such as Plaxo Pulse means much more than simply translating the product or adapting images and examples. It means customizing Pulse so that it makes sense to the users in each country. People in other parts of the world may use sites to upload photos, post blogs or share videos that are different from the ones we use in the US -- so those feeds should be made available. And it should be easy for them to import their address books into Pulse leveraging the services they already use, which also vary from country to country.
So after making Pulse available in our supported languages (which we will be expanding soon) we are now looking at each of our major markets and adding custom features that can bring life and meaning to people’s Pulse experience.
Last week we targeted our growing number of users in India and made it possible for them to import their Indiatimes or Rediff mail address books into Pulse. And we are also offering some beautiful eCards celebrating the popular Holi festival or Festival of Colors.

We will continue to be busy at work bringing other custom features to different countries each week!
Regina Bustamante
Director, Globalization

Most of us are choosing to share ever more of our lives publicly on the web, on blogs, Flickr, and an ever-expanding array of user-generated content sites. One result of that is that our public identities are becoming ever more fragmented.

Naturally, giving users the ability to create a unified public profile – enriched by some (or all) of their aggregated content stream in Pulse – was something on our product roadmap for later this year.

But a collaboration between our Joseph Smarr and Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick dramatically accelerated the timeline. We jumped when we got the chance to have our public profile pages serve as the flagship example of things made possible by Google’s new Social Graph API, which was just released an hour ago. (See coverage in TechCrunch and ZD Net.) Pulse uses the API to make it easy for you to gather up the various URLs that belong to you all over the public web and use them to create a unified public identity under your control.

As you can see in the above screenshot, this is a totally new kind of public profile for the Social Web. The page is not static; it’s constantly enriched by the aggregated stream of the content you are creating all over the web.

Public profiles are a completly opt-in feature. You’ve got fine-grained control of what content and information you include. And, because the pages are tagged with the appropriate microformats, you can use your Plaxo public profile to assert your public identity in a way that’s readable by Google and other sites. The result is that you have control and portability of your public identity.

This is just a first release. Expect to see us invest a lot more in this area in the coming weeks.

To set up your public profile, go to Pulse, then click on My Profile at the top. Then, on the left-hand side, click on Public Profile.

It’s great to see the building blocks of the Social Web coming together so quickly!

John McCrea
vp of marketing

We soft-launched a “status” feature in Pulse about a week ago, and it’s already proving to be very popular. But for people using lots of different services, having yet another place to type in what they’re up to is hardly a convenience.

Indeed, if you’ve been following the Plaxo story closely, you know that we’re not trying to build “yet another social network”. Instead, we’re on a mission to help bring about an open version of the Social Web, one defined by interoperability between sites, with you in control of your data and content and how it moves between services.

So, in line with that vision, we’re enhancing the Pulse status feature with the ability to synchronize it with other services, starting today with Twitter. And what’s really cool is that you have a choice of one-way or two-way sync. What does that mean?

If you set up status sync to Twitter, when you update your status in Pulse, it will be instantly updated in Twitter. (And, as you’re typing, you’ll see a character countdown from 140 and the ability to shrink links via tinyurl.)

(In addition, if you’ve already installed the Twitter app on Facebook, that status message you originated in Pulse will update your status inside Facebook!)

And, if you also choose to sync from Twitter to Pulse? When you’re in Twitter – okay, admit it, that may be most of your waking hours – your tweets will automatically update your status in Pulse. (And don’t worry, we do some smart “echo cancellation,” so you’ll only see one copy of your status update in each place.) At release time, such updates in Pulse are not instantaneous, but they will be soon.

If you haven't hooked up your Twitter to you Pulse, start by adding the feed. You'll be prompted with how to also set up sync status. If you're already feeding your tweets into Pulse, just go edit your Profile Settings.

We think this is both a really useful feature and a great demonstration of things to come when social sites interoperate. You could also imagine that future versions of the status feature might sync with other services, such as Jaiku. Let me know which ones you’d most like to see. Just send a tweet to johnmccrea!

If you're anything like us, you can't stop checking your Pulse. If you're anything like some of us (the cool ones), you also have an iPhone. That's why us cool people got together to make a special iPhone version of Pulse. Everything is custom made for that little iPhone screen, allowing those of us with sausage fingers to easily see photos, messages, and web-wide updates (from over 30 sites) from the people you know.

This is just the latest way we're helping you get your data where you need it. We recently rolled out integration with the Mac address book and Microsoft Outlook. To access Pulse on your iPhone, just point your browser to http://pulse.plaxo.com and sign in. You'll be redirected automatically (but you can still access the original web version, of course).

All feedback is appreciated. If you don't have a Plaxo account yet, go ahead and signup.

Pete Curley
Senior product manager

PS. Did you know that if you sync your Outlook or Mac with your iPhone through iTunes, your Plaxo contacts and calendar will be in there too? Pretty neat.

Update: Here's a quick video, too...

Today marks a tremendously important milestone for believers of an Open Web. Yahoo! has announced it will provide OpenIDs for its nearly 250 Million users, meaning they will all be able to carry their digital identity with them in a secure way and use it to interact richly and securely with sites across the web. In parallel, Plaxo has also just released full support for consuming OpenID 2.0, which means among other things that all those Yahoo! users will be able to join Plaxo and use it to synchronize their data without having to create and manage yet-another-login-and-password. And of course so will the users of any other site that supports OpenID. That’s the great thing about open standards—the more people use them, the better they get.

Having a company as big and important as Yahoo! embrace a grass-roots, open-web standard like OpenID is a major accomplishment and validation. OpenID is now officially a mainstream technology, and the proof is that millions of users will now be able to take advantage of it, without ever knowing what OpenID is, how it works, or that they’re even using it. That’s because OpenID 2.0 (which was finalized late last year) includes a number of security and usability enhancements that will make it “just work” for mainstream users. In addition to the current “sign in with your OpenID” functionality on Plaxo, you will soon see a simple button that says “Sign in with your Yahoo! ID”. When you click this button, you’ll be taken to Yahoo!, where you sign in as you normally do, and you’ll be asked if you trust Plaxo to know who you are. Once you consent, you’ll be taken back to Plaxo, and presto! We create an account for you that’s tied to your Yahoo! account via OpenID. When you want to log into Plaxo, you log in via Yahoo, and Plaxo knows who you are and that you’re logged in, thanks to some cryptographic magic on the backend that you never have to worry about. All you know is “I use Yahoo, and now I can use it with Plaxo too.” That’s what it feels like when open social web technology really works.

And that’s just the start. The reason people are excited about OpenID—and the reason Yahoo! has chosen to embrace it—goes far beyond the convenience of single sign-on. The real power of OpenID is that it’s a key building block for giving users a durable and meaningful digital identity that they can use across the entire web. In an OpenID world, the services you use will really know who you are (because you can prove it with OpenID), and they’ll be able to talk to each other in a rich and secure manner (because you are now the same person to both sites). So, you’ll be able to consolidate your online identity (to the extent you want to, of course) and present a unified view of who you really are. And your friends will do the same. So when we talk about an “open social web” where you can stay in touch with the people you care about even though you’re all using different tools and services, this is what we mean. And this is how it’s going to happen. And today it just got real. If you can’t tell, we’re pretty excited.

=joseph.smarr, chief platform architect