We've just released a new version of the Plaxo Toolbar for Outlook and Outlook Express, version 2.8. There's nothing really dramatic in here, mostly minor fixes and such.

Do those images look better? We're using a better image scaling technique, so the photos on the Click-To-Connect buttons and elsewhere should look nicer now.

Anti-Spam As part of our effort to cut down on unwanted e-mails, the Update Contacts button has been removed from the toolbar, though still available through the menu, and all the recipients are UNchecked by default.

Bugs We also fixed some minor bugs, mostly related to the new Click-To-Connect button.

To download this version of our Outlook Toolbar, visit our downloads page.

Part of the rationale for Plaxo is a belief that, while the past 10 years of the Internet has made it easier to connect people to information and businesses, the record has been far more mixed when it comes to connecting people to each other.

Ten years ago, Robert Putnam published a paper (and subsequent book) called "Bowling Alone". The central thesis was that there had been a great decline in “social capital” since the 1970’s. Rates of participation in a broad range of civic engagement had all undergone huge declines, from political participation (down 25%), to attendance at PTA meetings (down 61%), to charitable giving (down 20%), to participation in clubs, fraternal and service organizations, etc. (down 58%). Even purely social forms of engagement, such as inviting friends over for dinner (down 45%) or joining bowling leagues (down 70%, hence the title of the book) had declined significantly.

All of this was disturbing, because if people don’t have connections with the other members of their community, they are less likely to be able to band together to deal with problems, be they environmental, educational, social, etc.

Of course, all of this was before the Internet had really taken off. And while the trends discussed above appear to have continued, is it possible that the old ways of building social capital have been replaced with new forms? People now join virtual communities, enabling them to form common cause with people who feel the same way that they do about the rainforest or Howard Dean. Or, they can find people who are dealing with the same medical issues that they are. An organization that I have been involved with for a number of years, Partners for Youth with Disability, has embraced online communities as a way of helping kids with physical disabilities to connect with peers and adult mentors—something that was often difficult to do in the physical world given mobility issues. And, while we may be bowling alone, we are participating in MUDs and online poker tournaments in record numbers.

So, is there still cause for concern? Are people really engaging with each other more because of the Internet? Have the social uses of the Internet substituted for more passive forms of entertainment (are we watching TV less and blogging more?), or has online interaction taken away from time spent with friends, neighbors, and family? A recent report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project seems to take the more positive view of the Internet’s impact on social capital. What do you think? Can service like Plaxo help generate social capital (in addition to the more traditional financial forms of capital)?

Plaxo has been taking its lumps across the blogosphere the past couple of days. Most of which, frankly, we deserve.

A few days ago, Plaxo Founder Todd Masonis blogged that we will be taking steps to drastically reduce the number of update requests that our members send out. Not surprisingly, people like Michael Arrington, Dan Gilmore, the AP and numerous others in the blogosphere have responded saying in essence:

A) “You should have done this a lot sooner”
B) “You clearly knew that what you were doing was wrong”
C) “You’re evil, horrible people who should be banished to Hades”
D) “You should apologize”

I unambiguously agree with A. I also unambiguously agree with D. (I’ll reserve my thoughts on B & C for a later post.) If there is a 12 step program for start-ups who make mistakes in developing their service, certainly the first few steps have to include: admitting that you have a problem, apologizing to those you’ve wronged, and making steady progress in correcting what was wrong.

So, here it goes:

To everyone who hated getting Plaxo update messages, felt we were generating acquaintance spam, or otherwise were harmed by the service, I personally apologize on behalf of all of the people at Plaxo. I know we have a long way to go to earn your trust, and can only ask that you judge us by our actions going forward.

Ben Golub, CEO (Contact info available at techcrunch)

I am excited to join Plaxo as the company’s first vice president of marketing. I hope that is auspicious that on the day we announced my joining (yesterday), we also marked a more significant milestone – 10 million registered users of the service. And as important as that number is (given that Plaxo’s utility is directly linked to the size of our user base), for me it pales in comparison to the dramatic shape of the underlying growth curve that brought us to that mark.

As the chart below shows, we are now beginning to experience the “knee” of our exponential growth curve.

I’ve been thinking a lot about exponential growth curves of late, inspired by Ray Kurzweil’s latest book, “The Singularity is Near”.

I won’t try to explain the book here (though I will make the aside that I highly recommend this book.) But there is one of Kurzweil’s key premises I will comment on, namely that people – even very smart, well educated people – are lousy at understanding the implications of exponential curves. We tend to be linear in our thinking about the future, assuming that the next five years will be reasonably similar to the past five years. Such thinking greatly underestimates the pace of progress when the driver of change is something that is doubling every twelve or so months.

In this, my first post to the Plaxo blog, I’ll stop short of making a Kurzweil-like bold prediction for Plaxo’s future. I will say, however, that I think I am in for a very exciting ride. And it’s a ride I look forward to sharing with you, the Plaxo community.

To that end, one my key goals is to help Plaxo do a better job of explaining who we are, what our offerings do – and what they don’t do. In short, to achieve much greater transparency. To that end, I encourage you correspond directly with me or to post your questions or comments.

I came across the following blog today titled: Outted by Plaxo. In his article, the author warns people of blowing the news of an upcoming job or acquisition by prematurely updating your Plaxo cards.

I think this is good advice, and something I'd like to echo here.

The great thing about Plaxo is that it works to keep you updated and connected at all times. When you modify your details, Plaxo automatically updates the address books of other connected members, and these updates occur in near-real time. We certainly want to encourage you to keep your details updated and accurate, but you should also be careful not to inadvertently update others of change events sooner than intended.

To assist in this, a soon-to-be released version of Plaxo will bring some welcomed improvements to the process of updating your Plaxo cards. Prior to saving your updated details, Plaxo will remind you connected members will be automatically updated with your new details. You will also have greater control over the member alert normally generated by your update. You'll soon be able to keep your friends and family members updated with your new details, but if you would prefer the update to be silent (ie: no alert generated), you'll now have that cability. We'll blog more about these features once they are released.

PS: Here are a couple of blogs that highlight how Plaxo alerts have been useful in notifying members of changes in their network. I guess this makes Plaxo an early indicator of job market activity :-)

If you're not a Plaxo member, chances are you have gotten an e-mail that went something like this: "Hi, I'm updating my address book. Please take a moment to update your latest contact information..." For three years now, this has been a key part of the Plaxo service as millions of people have used our update tool to quickly and easily regain control of their address books. But as of a a few weeks ago, you should start seeing fewer and fewer of these e-mails, as we've shifted our product functionality away from address book update.

When we started Plaxo, we had a vision to create a self-updating address book. The idea seems pretty simple: I maintain my own contact information, and when I change it, it automatically updates in my friends' address books. Similarly, when my friends update their information, it changes in my address book. If everyone uses Plaxo, then like magic, everyone stays up-to-date and never has to worry about this problem again. Better yet, Plaxo would plug in to Outlook and other popular address books, for maximum convenience.

The big 'if' in all of this was of course convincing everyone in the world to use Plaxo -- and contact management is not always the sexiest of problems. Until large numbers of people started using Plaxo, automatic updating wouldn't provide much value.

We therefore came up with a model where people could still find value in using our service without there being a large network. I could download Plaxo and in a few steps e-mail contacts asking them for their up-to-date information. Then, usually within a few days (usually more like a few hours) my contacts would respond and my address would be updated. Some of my contacts would see this as a valuable service, and also start using Plaxo. In doing so, they would introduce Plaxo to more of their friends, but the real magic happened when they became members -- because from that point forward they would no longer send out Plaxo update requests -- everything would just happen automatically.

Obviously, a lot of people loved this feature, but some people did not. Journalists, A-list bloggers, and anyone else who is known by more people than they know were inundated with requests. We quickly responded by adding opt-out and throttling features, but we've always known that the update requests were a means to an end -- our goal has always been to get as many members as possible so that these e-mails were unnecessary. And it looks like we're finally getting to that end.

As of last week, we've past 10 million members. We are now growing at over 50,000 users a day. Due to this great growth, the depth of our network, plus our heartfelt desire to be good net citizens, we have started phasing out update requests.

This feature will probably always exist in some form, but we are no longer aggressively pushing new users to send out e-mails and are adding restrictions to prevent existing users from sending out large batches. Within the next six months (allowing for releases and upgrades to our base), you should see these messages drop to a trickle. In specific, here's our plan:

* The new Plaxo plug-in for Mac does not include this feature
* The Plaxo plug-in for Thunderbird does not include this feature
* The Plaxo AIM Triton integration does not include this feature
* New versions of the Outlook plug-in limits e-mail batch sizes for all users

And coming soon:

* The new user flow for Outlook will not direct users to send out update requests.

These changes in specific affect non-Plaxo members, but we've also got a number of related changes to trim down our member-member communication. More details to come.

It's only been a few weeks since we released our Address Book Access web widget, but already a number of prominent sites have started using it, including YouTube, Zazzle, and others. If you haven't seen it yet, this widget lets any site easily auto-import a user's existing address book, including from Hotmail, Yahoo!, AOL, Gmail, Outlook, and Plaxo. Potential uses include letting your users send links or invitations to their friends (without having to remember and type in all their email addresses), seeing who you know that's already using a given service (e.g. finding friends on Flickr or Netflix), hopefully lots of uses we haven't anticipated!

In talking with current and potential partners, the one thing everyone tells us is "we want our users to have access to their current address book, but we really don't want to build--yet alone maintain--import code for all these different sites". We recently experienced a good example of why people feel this way: a couple of weeks ago, Gmail changed the charset encoding they used when exporting contacts, which broke the existing import code. Luckily, our monitoring tools picked this up right away, and once we figured out what had changed we were able to quickly build and release a fixed version. We have to do this kind of thing for a living anyway, but you certainly shouldn't have to go through that yourself! That's the idea behind the widget. :)

If you've added the widget to your site (or if you've used our sync API), please drop us a line. We're building a gallery of Plaxo-enabled sites and services, and we'd love to show off what you've done.

--Joseph Smarr, Lead Developer, Address Book Access Widget

We had a minor glitch in our servers which is affecting some users when they try to login to Plaxo Online. Our customers said it wasn't so much a problem that the service was down, the problem was more that there wasn't a channel where we could communicate service-level issues with them.

So rather than pretend it's not happening (as some services are prone to do ;) ), we listened to our customers and created the Plaxo OPS blog. If you're a Plaxo user and want to keep up-to-date on what's going on with our service, just subscribe to that blog or check it every once in a while. We think this is a win-win situation, let us know what you think.

I've always been fascinated by old photographs. Besides being a transport back in time—Brando is skinny, Steve Jobs is wearing a suit, Bill Gates looks like a nerd, well, a young nerd—I find the oldness of the black and white photos intriguing. Men wore hats, kids' clothes weren't smattered with logos, apricot orchards blanketed the valley, and those black and white prints had a timeless quality that insta-matics couldn't touch.

I've been shooting pictures in and around the office here at Plaxo since I started three months ago. The office has a few partitions, but mostly it's a big open floor with islands of desks and computers. Without the protection of walls, people are easy to shoot. Sort of. The monitors get in the way, but if people have an impromptu meeting on the other side of my desk I'll shoot them. I have a silent trigger and I can swivel the back of the camera so I shoot looking down, like on a Hasselblad. This let me get the odd shot of Rikk making faces.

He thought I was just setting up. He doesn't like that picture, so figured I had to find a way to work it into this blog. I like candids—catching people when they forget they're being photographed and let their 'IS' be taken. The people here at Plaxo are a friendly, animated, likable lot. For a company of 40 plus people, I've heard, we're perceived as a much larger entity—a behemoth, a faceless corporation even. Not even. Take a look for yourself.

My Dad always had a 'You're On' face. He put it on just as anyone squinched one eye and with the other took aim through a viewfinder. Every shot of him? Cocked head, toothy grin, and a look in his eye that seemed to say, 'What's it going to take for you to drive home in this car today?'

Four years ago I got my Cybershot and I took snapshots: on vacation, smile-it's-your-birthday kinds of snaps. I was visiting my Dad and was looking down, seeing him on the glass my new digital camera and my son said something that made 'Grandpa' laugh. And I pulled the trigger. This time it wasn't a snap. It was THE shot of my Dad. 'My eyes are closed and I need a haircut,' he'd say. He didn't like it. Everyone else did. My Mom liked it. She had a print made to set on the altar at his memorial service last year. I love the shot because it IS my Dad. And it's my Dad in THE shot that marked the moment I went from taking snaps to aiming for photographs.

-Michael Rowley, Visual Designer & Resident Photographer

(My Dad: Don Rowley)

Today we released a new beta of Plaxo for the Mac ("Maxo", as we affectionately call it here). Woohoo! And, of course we're all very excited about releasing a new product and finishing something that we've been working on for three friggin' years. There's a deeper meaning to this release, but I will get to that later...

Maxo team: Dru Nelson, Drew Colace, Jie Chen, Wendy Johnson (w/ Rosco), Mark Jen, Christian Bohland

Why did it take so damn long?

Plaxo has been around for four years (yikes!), and at our core, we've always felt that rather than inventing yet-another-address-book (or calendar), we wanted to bring Plaxo features to your existing address book. So, as a small startup in 2002, it made sense to start with Outlook and Outlook Express, since it clearly had the largest user base. And, like many young startups in their honeymoon phase, we had grand plans to quickly integrate with lots of other platforms, such as Mac, Act!, Lotus, Y!, Hotmail, and so on. This same question—"when do we do the Mac port?"—has happened at practically every job I've had (and in most cases, it never happened).

Well, as you can imagine, 2002 faded into 2003, and 2003 faded into 2004, and so on, and we still were putting huge effort into Outlook and Outlook Express. To be really honest, we didn't realize what we had bitten off when we started down the Outlook path—the stuff we've done to make Outlook and Outlook Express support Plaxo is a combination of creative engineering and voodoo incantations—but the good news is that we've finally figured it out and now have time to integrate with other platforms (no more dead chickens!).

Outlook Voodoo priest

[btw: Believe it or not, we started our very first Mac project back in 2002. We asked a few of our Mac friends to work in parallel with our Windows team and to try to stay up-to-date (source-wise). Unfortunately, this was a classic case of starting too early. The architecture was changing so rapidly that the Mac team was constantly out of date and eventually fell too far behind. The good news is that we finally got our APIs down and now have a base to start lots of new integration projects from.]

So, about a year ago we met Drew Colace. He impressed us with his Mac dev knowledge and captivating personality, and after changing our minds another ten times, we hired Drew to get us back on the Mac train. Drew jumped in with both hands typing and launched our first beta of Mac Plaxo in November 2005. Today's release is a major revision and was motivated by a lot of great feedback that we received from the first beta (thanks to everyone that helped!).

Why not do the Mac?

There are many great reasons for a developer or product manager to choose not to do the Mac version. In our case, there are definitely larger online address book user bases out there (e.g. Yahoo! and Hotmail) and Mac OSX is a completely unfamiliar operating system and development environment (and therefore expensive, risky, and complicated). And, a new platform introduces all kinds of new quality assurance and customer support issues. The list goes on, so I'm sure you get the idea. Inevitably it comes down to "is it worth the effort?" This is a question that thousands of product managers and engineering teams ask themselves (and most say "no" for reasons similar to above).

Why do the Mac?

So, why did we do the Mac? In most cases, the answer is because someone inside the company is a Mac zealot and begs enough to eventually get a programmer to hack out a demo and if they are really, really lucky, it actually ships for a few weeks (but gets little support or nurturing). It's rarely done for the right reasons and thus eventually peters out. But in our case, no one was a Mac zealot—although, we now have several Mac lovers at Plaxo—and we had no programmers with Mac dev experience. So, two things influenced us: 1) a Mac version of Plaxo was clearly the most requested feature we received; 2) the Mac community is rabid about products and embrace new things (if done well) with passion and enthusiasm; and 3) we firmly believed that we are not an Outlook-only shop. So, we saw a great opportunity to grow a small segment of extremely active users and force us to develop APIs that encouraged integration with Plaxo across a broad set of platforms.

API is the key

So, the story-within-the-story is that Plaxo is developing a platform to enable widespread integration. And, we wanted to eat our own dog food before others used our API. So, Maxo was the perfect choice to test this out since it was so different from the development environments that we were used to. We figured that if the APIs worked for a Mac programmer, they will work for anyone. :-) And, the only reason that it took us so long to release Maxo was because it was the guinea pig for future API users. As you can guess, this slowed Drew and team down quite a bit, but they persevered and shipped Maxo.

UI Evolution

Integrating Plaxo into the Mac Address Book offered unique UI challenges to us since we were less familiar with the Mac user experience and we recognized the importance of a 100% Mac experience. Anything less and we expected to be ignored by the Mac community.

A few key things drove our user experience design: 1) 100% Mac, 2) integrate into the Mac Address Book, not compete with it, and 3) find the right visual balance between "fits in" and "stands out."

Our first revision looked like this. We created a separate Plaxo address book application that synced with the Mac Address Book. This immediately felt weird and forced the user to make a choice between the Mac Address Book and the Plaxo Address Book.

Screen shot of Maxo first alpha release

In our second revision (Beta 1), we tried to integrate the Plaxo features into the Mac Address Book. We added the Plaxo widget at the bottom of the contact entry, but found this to be problematic and often obscuring the contact details.

Screen shot of Maxo first beta release

And, our current Beta looks like this. We moved the Plaxo enhancements to the right side of the contact details and enabled users to expand and contract the panel. This appears to be the best choice, but we're still looking for feedback.

Screen shot of Maxo second beta release

You can download the latest version at: http://www.plaxo.com/downloads/mac/

See the press release at: http://www.plaxo.com/about/releases/release-20060314

--Rikk Carey, EVP Engineering & Operations

We try to keep up to speed on what the blogosphere can tell us about how people are using Plaxo. Lately we've seen a few examples of people finding out about important news through their Plaxo network before hearing it through other channels.

First, it looks like Plaxo can help people keep up on employment trends. Dave Evans of Corante blogged about the flight of top people at match.com, which he found out about through Plaxo.

Plaxo also tipped off Derrick Oien that something was happening with SplashBlog, a mobile blogging software company that recently got acquired by Six Apart.

We think it's cool that Plaxo is keeping people updated about what's going on with their friends. Just remember: if your Plaxo cards are public, people you have you in their address book will see the changes you make... but that's the whole point, right? :)

Woo-hoo! The Plaxo Toolbar for Internet Explorer version 1.0 has arrived and we've included some goodies in it for everyone:

1. AIM users: AIM users can now sign in with their AIM screen names and passwords.
2. People who are thoughtful, but lazy: Send eCards directly from the toolbar or while looking at a contact's details. "Thank you" and "Happy Birthday" cards are only a click away.
3. People who are bugged by bugs: While we were at it, we thought we'd fix some bugs too.

Upgrade or download your toolbar now. It's good stuff: http://www.plaxo.com/ietoolbar

Janice Ta, IE Toolbar Product Manager