We’re guessing that most of you aren’t losing sleep at night wondering what Plaxo is doing for you. But wouldn’t it be nice to get a peek into the changes that are happening while you’re sleeping?

We just redesigned the quarterly My Plaxo summary so you can get an instant snapshot of all the activity that has taken place in your smart address book over the last 3 months.

Soon you should receive (if you haven’t already) a snazzy looking e-mail that gives you information about:

• Your contact info: You can see your latest contact info and when you last updated it and edit it.
• Upcoming birthdays: A list of upcoming birthdays for people in your address book and an easy way to send an eCard for delivery on the day of choice.
• New connections: People you recently added to your address book or who recently joined Plaxo.
• New info changes: See all the changes like new addresses, companies, job titles and phone numbers for the people in your address book.
• New places you can use your smart address book: New partner sites on the web where you can directly access your Plaxo smart address book to do things like send e-mails, gifts and forward movies to your contacts seamlessly.

Of course, if you ever want to opt-out of receiving these e-mails, it’s really easy. There’s a little link at the bottom that takes you to your communication preferences.

But hopefully, you’ll find the quarterly My Plaxo summary useful and interesting and that it will give you a little “ah-a” moment where you say to yourself, “So that’s what Plaxo’s been doing for me all this time!”

-- Dassi Shusterman, Sr. Product Manager

If you've been getting this blog via our feed, you probably haven't noticed that we rolled out a new blog template. Our old template was prone to getting messed up when we tried to post large pictures and had a lot of chrome for a simple blog like ours, so we simplified!

Here's our old template:

And here's the new template:

Hope you guys like it; if you've got suggestions we'd love to hear them! Also if you find any strange rendering bugs, please let us know so we can take care of them. Thanks!

-- Mark Jen, Product Manager

At my parent's home, you can always find a stack of calling cards next to the phone in the kitchen. It's the cheapest way for them to keep in touch with their family in Vietnam. But calling cards have always been such a hassle. Minutes run out, some cards don't work, and the rates really aren't all that cheap. My mom was paying about $0.27/minute to call her niece in Vietnam with a calling card. Over the weekend, though, my sister and I got my mom to try her first international call via Plaxo Click to Call. She converted solely on the cost. At $0.16/min., she talked to her niece for longer and with no interruptions from minutes running out on her calling card. And she did it all from the convenience of her landline phone.

You, dear reader, can also find the Plaxo Click to Call button in your address book. It's the easiest way to make inexpensive phone calls. By easy, I mean no headsets, no downloads, and no microphones. Just Plaxo, you, and your phone. And by inexpensive, I mean less than $0.0212/min to China, $0.0196/min to Germany, and only $.001/min in the US. You can check out the rest of the rates here. By partnering with Jajah, our members get the additional benefit of not having to remember or type in any phone numbers, and they always know the number they're calling is up-to-date with Plaxo's smart address book.

Here's how you can initiate a call:

Jajah in Outlook	Jajah in Plaxo Online

1. Go to your Plaxo Online address book or get the latest Plaxo plug-in for Outlook to make calls from your Outlook address book. (Plans are in the works to integrate with Outlook Express and our other clients too.)
2. Decide who you want to call. Click on the purple button. (See picture above).
3. Plaxo transfers the numbers to Jajah's website.
4. Hit the green "Place Call" button on Jajah's website.

THEN...


5. Your phone rings.


6. Your contact's phone rings.


7. And you can start chatting.

Mom doesn't always "get" what I do at Plaxo, but now she sort of gets it and she likes it. Now, when she can't get in touch with me on the weekends, she can call Vietnam :)

-- Janice (Hi, Mom!) Ta, Product Manager

So here was my mistake that led me to write this post. I was chatting with a co-worker, discussing my long held belief that the executive assistant is the easiest way to judge the true persona of an executive. My theory was so enjoyed that it was suggested I blog it. Many thanks, I will eventually return the favor…..

So my theory goes like this:

I have been an EA for a lot of years, and worked for several companies, large and small. Over the years my theory has almost always held true.

In my line of work, I am constantly communicating with other executive assistants, coordinating complicated schedules and meetings. Sometimes these interactions are very simple and pleasant. Sometimes they are so painful and political it gives me a headache. Whenever these little interactions are over, I usually have a pretty decent picture of the executive’s personality, without ever speaking with them.

One of my favorite things to do is to be around to greet an exec when it's time for the first meeting (to prove myself right). For example, if the EA is easy to work with, pleasant, always follows up, etc., chances are the exec is a low maintenance, generally nice person who treats them with respect. If the EA is a harried, unorganized mess who can’t remember what the action item was and never calls me back, I assume the exec is constantly throwing them curve balls, leaving them out of the loop a lot and is possibly a yeller. If the EA is just rude, demanding that the meeting happen at their preferred location, at their preferred time, and never tries to be considerate of the other schedules involved, I assume that the executive is a bit of a megalomaniac and has hired a gatekeeper to protect them and to encourage others to be deferential and to stroke the exec’s massive ego.

And then there are the idiot EAs. The ones that make me wonder how they manage to drive to work each day without getting lost. Usually these EA’s are extremely attractive women (think vapid Barbie) who are hired by very vain men. These exec’s are convinced that appearances are more important than efficiency and substance (Many of the EA’s that I have worked with over the years are very attractive people who are also extremely good at their jobs. You know who you are, and I'm not talking about you.).

The final type is the bossy EA. This is the person who thinks that they really, truly run the company. They know everything about the company, and always have their executive’s schedule memorized. They try to keep their hands in everything and tend to have control issues. This exec is usually insanely busy and appreciates structure. Some would say I fall into this category. I can be a bit bossy and perhaps tend to pester if I think a meeting may be missed. I think my boss needs this. Does he think he needs this? I don’t know, I never asked.

-- Randi Melo, Executive Assistant to the CEO

A bunch of us from Plaxo (Rikk, Joseph, Dan, and I) had the opportunity to attend the Singularity Summit over at Stanford this past Saturday, including a special reception afterwards at the Computer History Museum just down the road from us.

What’s the Singularity? There are different ways to describe it, but the subtitle from Ray Kurzweil’s book on the topic, The Singularity is Near, is “When Evolution Transcends Biology.” There were many speakers, representing a diversity of views. Some of the highlights for me included:

Seeing Kurzweil live. He wowed us with a demo of a product that I would describe as an intelligent camera for the blind. Point the camera at a page of text, and it reads it out loud. Let your hand stray a bit, and the camera tells you that it is not being pointed squarely at the page (and directs you to point it downward 30 degrees). And according to Ray: point it at a pet, and it can tell you whether it’s a cat or a dog. (With thanks to Google Image search for giving access to millions of dog and cat pictures to train the AI behind it to pattern match dog vs. cat.)

Douglas Hofstadter’s use of hand-drawn cartoons to illustrate his points. In contrast, during Nick Bostrom’s talk, which covered “existential risks” to humanity (including that our universe is just a computer simulation that might get turned off), I found myself wishing to add one more risk to his slides: “death by PowerPoint.” (Nick, not targeting you on that; just a general comment about lengthy, text-heavy slide decks.)

Sebastian Thrun’s presentation on Stanford’s win in the DARPA-funded robotic car race. He shared hilarious video clips of various mishaps, including, believe it or not, a robotic motorcycle that fell over within feet of the start.

Eric Drexler’s presentation on nano-manufacturing. He mentioned that M.I.T. has added the first new Course (department) in a very long time: Biological Engineering. I pay attention to that sort of stuff now – in part, because I failed to grasp the true importance of there being a “Materials Science” Course as part of the core curriculum back in the early ‘80’s.

And lastly, Bill McKibben’s haunting talk in favor of restraint. He offered that the two most important inventions of the 20th Century were wilderness preserves and non-violent protest. There was a strange irony to his talk, in that the only “anti-tech” speaker was presenting not in person, but via a cool videoconferencing technology that projected a life-size image of him onto a glass surface, behind a lectern. It really looked at times as if he were in the room with us. I found myself wondering if perhaps he were in fact an AI, and that we were witnessing a public Turing test!

Overall, it was a really interesting event. My congratulations and thanks to Tyler Emerson and the Singularity Institute for Articificial Intelligence for a great job organizing it (and thanks for inviting some of us from Plaxo to attend!).

There were also numerous references to Internet topics, like social networking and Google. And I got into a number of great conversations about how a “smart address book” can play a vital, even central role in our ever more digital, networked lives.

We had quite the kickin' party at Plaxo last night; there were a ton of people visiting from various tech companies in the area. Here are some pictures from the event:

Here's Tawheed and Pete doing what they do best ;)

And Jeremiah, who also blogged about the party

Thanks for all who came; hope to see you at the next Lunch 2.0 event! :D

-- Mark Jen, Product Manager

There is a lot of “tech talk” on this site; for a change, I wanted to take a moment to do some reflection about a new Plaxo benefit. During the past 8-weeks, I have researched and designed a new paid Parental Leave policy here at Plaxo.

I want to thank Mischa for volunteering to be Plaxo’s “test case”! Mischa is our newest mom, at Plaxo. Mischa worked with me in order to help me “come up to speed” on the issues. Mazel Tov and congratulations to you, Mischa! Also, thank you, Ben, for championing this new policy, approving of one of the most generous and unique paid parental leave policies in Silicon Valley for a new Internet startup.

So, you might be asking, “what is the problem”? Did you know that parental leave is guaranteed as a result of federal and state legislation? California has led the way in the U.S. and has one of the most progressive parental leave standards in the U.S. However, this is poorly paid or unpaid leave! Have you ever tried to live on your state disability insurance? The U.S. is the only industrialized country in the world that doesn’t have fully paid parental leave other than Australia. There are 163 countries in the world that give women paid leave with the birth of a child, and 45 countries that give fathers the right to paid parental leave.

As I researched Plaxo’s new policy, I found myself sort of blazing new territory on this one, especially when it came to defining a fully paid parental leave policy. Some of the local Silicon Valley profitable firms offer paid parental leave. But how many pre-IPO startups offer fully paid parental leave to their employees?

In California, the only way for a parent to take paid parental leave is to file for State Disability Insurance or Paid Family Leave. However, when you calculate it all out, these sources of income are dismal at best. So, we decided that parental leave, before, during, or after the birth of a child, for whatever reason, isn’t necessarily a disability. It is natural (did you know that a vast majority of all women become mothers?) and we, at Plaxo, believe corporations need to support our parent’s and children’s needs. And, we mean really support them, with financial support.

We decided to look at supplemental approaches to state disability insurance. One way we came up with is to provide fully paid parental leave to supplement their state sponsored disability and paid family leave insurance. We will pay our Plaxo parents an amount equal to their current salary (minus whatever the state or feds give them) for up to 6-weeks in order to care for their newborns before, during or after birth, for whatever reason.

Although we lose our employee’s productivity during their paid parental leave, we believe they will become more thoughtful and more productive Plaxo employees when they return to work.

So that’s it. I work for Plaxo, a leader in paid parental leave. If you wish to sponsor such a policy at your own company and you would like to chat, please feel free to contact me directly.

Respectfully submitted,

Stuart Liroff
Sr. Director of Human Resources
stuart@plaxo.com

I’m another recent Plaxo hire…I joined two weeks ago to lead Plaxo’s Globalization effort. It’s time for us to expand our international presence and show our international members that we really care about them.

It may seem weird to say we want to increase international presence when we already have members in over 83 countries and about 30% of our members come from outside of the US. The 12 countries with the largest Plaxo membership are:

1. United Kingdom
2. Australia
3. Canada
4. Brazil
5. South Africa
6. Netherlands
7. Germany
8. France
9. Mexico
10. New Zealand
11. Italy
12. India

Did you notice the same thing I did when I first saw it? Seven of these are either English speaking countries or countries where people speak English well and feel comfortable using it. We have nothing against our English speaking members; in fact, we love them. But one of our goals in 2006 is to enhance the user experience of our non-English speaking members and show the world what a smart address book can do.

Judging from visits to our site and search trends, folks around the world are taking notice. According to Google Analytics and Google Trends.

There is definitely a correspondence to our overall international membership numbers, and also a noticeable absence of Asian countries.

Back to Globalization; we are working to consider international users’ needs from design to development to localization to support. Yes, we are going to localize Plaxo! We'll start with a few languages, with many more to follow. Can’t talk about dates yet, after all I’ve just started!

I’ve made a career of Globalization and am really passionate about it. If you are an international Plaxo member and have comments or suggestions, I'd love to hear from you. Please post here or email me directly.

-- Regina Bustamante, Director of Globalization

I’m the 7-day-old Director of Product Management at Plaxo. I've blogged a total of 67 words in my life - and not because of lack of opportunity. But these Plaxo guys believe strongly in transparency- so here we are.

Starting a new job is a little like starting to use a new application: You've heard some good things about it, some bad things about it, but you've decided it’s got something for you - so you take the plunge.

Four months ago, all I knew about Plaxo were the emails I had received (need I say more?). Then I learned while doing some peripheral investigation that it could free my Outlook data from my work computer so that I could see it from my home computer – or anywhere for that matter. I quickly downloaded Plaxo.
That night - I went home, logged into Plaxo Online, and saw my calendar and contacts (13 years worth from my now-previous work) now available to me without lugging and logging into my work laptop. WOW. Next I downloaded the toolbar for my home machine where my husband uses Outlook Express. Now all our contacts were in one place, and we created a calendar with the kids’ schedules. My life is now less split – if you know what I mean.

By coincidence, Plaxo came up as a career consideration. PERFECT. A product manager's dream: a great product, all kinds of opportunity for more functionality, as well as room for improvement ;-). After what seemed like 60 interviews (actually 12 - these guys are careful), things were looking good. In addition to the functionality, and the promise for MORE, and more better, the team met my criteria. They are very technically progressive, completely up-for-improvement, even if it means change, and basically, passionate about doing great things right. They also meet the bill in abilities: opinionated rocket scientists and inclined to move (VERY) fast. They even passed the good-time-over-lunch test.

So here I am.

Back to where I started - Starting a new job is a little like starting to use a new application…

When I started using Plaxo, I was confused - and anxious. I loved the synch and the access. But I was terribly worried: will this email my friends? Or worse yet, my old boyfriends? (The answer is no.) I worry. And finally – after years of perfecting my ability to worry – I am getting paid for it.

The Plaxo team is in the middle of an overhaul of sorts, and the office is talking about my old boyfriends (or those potential emails, to be more precise). I can’t wait to unveil the many exciting things we have coming out later this year – the worry free – only great value – Plaxo. (Note – I’m not in marketing)

As it probably goes without saying, I’m still using Plaxo. I love seeing my kids’ soccer schedule right next to my work schedule, and ALL my current contact info across all my applications. I can’t wait to do more. My usage patterns, fears and confusion are the subject of well deserved scrutiny around here. And soon – not only will I not need to worry, but I’ll actually stop worrying – at which time I’ll have to find something else for them to pay me for.

Heck – I may be so excited I’ll want to let my old boyfriends know… but I doubt it.

-- Laurel Lee, Director of Product Management

Next Tuesday (5/16) we're throwing a party to officially welcome the HipCal team to our family. Join us for free pizza and beer from 6PM - 9PM. To RSVP, leave a comment here or on the event's zvents page.

We only have room for about 100 people, so RSVP soon (and include your real e-mail address in the comment form so we can confirm you).

Plaxo for Mac 1.0 is ready for prime time and is now available for download. We've been busy improving performance, filling out our feature set and fixing some of bugs. Here's a partial list of what's new in 1.0:

• New contact card actions - Quickly send e-cards and get maps and directions for your contacts.


• Better contact history display - Now you can easily see the old and new values each time information in your contacts changes.


• Cooler animations and nicer graphics all around - who doens't like a good lookin' app? :)

Also, we were in the middle of building Entourage sync when Microsoft went ahead and did it for us. With the latest update of Entourage 2004 you can sync your Entourage Address Book with your OS X Address Book which effectively closes the loop. We've added an FAQ with detailed instructions on how to get things set up and running.

As always, please let us know if you run into any problems or have suggestions; we're listening and want to know what you'd like to see. Thanks!

-- Mark Jen, Product Manager

UPDATE: Plaxo for Mac 1.0 has been officially released.

The Plaxo for Mac team is very happy to announce that we've posted what is intended to be the full release of Plaxo for Mac 1.0. This is our release candidate so we don't anticipate any problems; if you're a Mac user that likes getting early access to software, please go ahead and give it a spin.

You can grab the release candidate (1.0 Preview) at:

http://down.plaxo.com/down/mac/beta/

Let us know if you run into any significant problems - our belief and hope is that you'll have a good experience with this release, but we would be remiss if we didn't ask!

If all goes well, this version will be posted to our main Plaxo for Mac download page at the end of this week (and will also be made available to the Auto Update feature in Plaxo for Mac).

Thanks!
Plaxo for Mac Team

In addition to the blast from the past Todd just mentioned, we just uploaded a video that was created at our third Haxo day a few weeks ago. Here's the YouTube clip:

All throughout the day Redgee ran around with a video camera and took short clips of us holding up these blank whiteboards; we had no idea what he was doing with the clips until last week when he unveiled his masterpiece at the company-wide Haxo show-and-tell.

If you liked the clip, Redgee also tried a few other songs; check out these alternate versions too!

This time around we focused the hackathon around building cool little tools that we could actually ship (yup we heard your feedback from our last Haxo post). We've got a few that are almost ready to go live, so stay tuned for when we launch Plaxo Labs! :)

-- Mark Jen, Product Manager

Bambi Francisco from Marketwatch sent a quick note letting us know that she posted a video segment on Plaxo to her blog. This piece was filmed about two years ago when we were searching for a CEO and originally aired on CBS. In start-up time it feels like forever-ago, but should give an inside glimpse in to what it took to find Ben.

You can find the video here (2nd story down)

A few weeks ago, I was asked to give a speech on the topic: “What is Web 2.0?” This invitation probably came as a surprise to many members of the technical team at Plaxo, who harbor secret doubts that I can even spell PHP.

Of course, concisely defining Web 2.0 is difficult. While many excellent analyses exist (e.g. O'Reilly's "What is Web 2.0"), the Web 2.0 moniker itself has been applied to everything from a collection of underlying technologies (Ajax, REST, RSS, LAMP), to community generated content (a la Flickr, MySpace, or Wikipedia), to the general transition of website from isolated information silos, and—of course—a way to convince VCs to invest in recycled, failed business plans from the late ‘90s. To paraphrase a famous line from Macbeth, Web 2.0 is in danger of becoming a term “Invested in by an Idiot, full of Sound and Fury, Signifying nothing.”

This is a real shame, because behind the hype and confusion, there are truly revolutionary changes afoot. There are over a billion internet users worldwide (vs. some 250 million at the height of the bubble). There were over 1.4 Trillion SMS messages sent in 2005, generating over $50B in revenues. And, new services with just the right value proposition for the time, like Skype and MySpace, can attract over 50M users in their first 18 months of operation.

To understand these dramatic shifts in the context of Web 2.0, however, I think it’s useful to look beyond the current technology and buzz words and look at what is happening now in historical context. It’s a big oversimplification, but every computing era can be defined largely by the kinds of revolutionary changes in interactions or “connections” that it enabled. With that as a framework, the revolutionary aspect of the mainframe and minicomputer eras of the 60’s and 70’s was the ability to connect businesses and their computers to data. All the fundamental work on memory, I/O, databases, backup and recovery, etc. etc. were supported that goal.

Similarly, the desktop operating systems, graphical user interfaces, and killer apps of the PC revolution were really about making it easy for people to connect to computers. Bridges, routers, LANs, etc. of the networking era of the early ‘90s? They were about connecting computers to other computers. And then, in the late ‘90s, “Web 1.0” took the next logical step of connecting people to businesses and data on other computers around the world. Search engines, online commerce, etc. were all both contributors to and outcomes of this new way of connecting.

Era	When	What was "Connected"	Leaders Born in this Era
Mainframe & Minicomputers	1960’s and ‘70s	Connect business and their computers to data	IBM
PC’s	1980’s	Connect People to Computers	Microsoft, Apple
Networking	Early ‘90s	Connect Computers to other Computers	Cisco
Web 1.0	1994-2001	Connect People to Businesses & Data on other Computers	AOL, Yahoo!, Amazon, Google
Web 2.0	Now	Connect People to People	TBD. Candidates may include: Flickr, Skype, MySpace, Facebook

Where are we now? There’s a lot of great technology that is making it easy for data on one computer to “connect” automatically with data on other computers. (Hence, the Web 2.0 focus on AJAX, RSS, etc.)

But, perhaps more importantly, we’re really entering an era where the primary emphasis is on connecting people to other people. Whether it’s social networks, community generated content, VoIP, or new mobile technology, the truly revolutionary and business-worthy ideas that are being born now are the ones that bring together technology and people and let creative combinations and business models flourish.

Of course, computing eras do overlap. Indeed, they build on each other. And, we are far from optimizing any of the “connections” outlined above. But, I do think it is instructive to look at the companies that are formed in each of the eras. Of course, a lot of new companies are born, compete with each other, and ultimately disappear. But, the companies that really lead the way in making the “connections” work tend to enjoy enormous success and can build on that success to become leaders in subsequent eras. Who will be the leader in connecting people to people? We have our own view on that, of course. Let the market decide….

This is the first in what I hope will be a series of posts on web development at Plaxo. We all believe that delivering a rich user experience over the web is an important part of what we do here. For some, it's a great addition to the address book or calendar they already use, and for others, a purely web-based solution is becoming increasingly attractive (as is true for many applications these days). In both cases, the challenge is the same: how can you push the envelope of the web development (from a technical and a design perspective) so that users feel like they're interacting with an intuitive and respsonive app that's always available on any computer?

Luckily for all of us, the current excitement over AJAX and related technologies is resulting in a rapid expansion of what's possible (and practical) to do with a web app. We have a pretty large AJAX-focused web dev team at Plaxo, and we're learning a lot of lessons that we're eager to share with the community (stay tuned). But I wanted to start by sharing the history of our web efforts to date here, highlighting the approaches we've taken so far and the current challenges we're wrangling with. So here goes:

As you probably know, one of the benefits of using Plaxo is you can always access your data on the web using Plaxo Online. This is particularly handy when you're away from your usual computer and you need to look up a phone number or calendar event. If you're using a Plaxo toolbar with your PIM app (e.g. Outlook or Thunderbird), Plaxo keeps a (secure and private) synced copy of your data server-side that you can access using Plaxo Online. So we have a full online address book, calendar, tasks, and notes web app, most of which is AJAX-like. The cal/task/note page is almost entirely AJAX (all data dynamically loaded, little if any full page refreshes) and the contacts page (which is older) is partially-dynamic (e.g. popping up a contact to edit its details and then saving it redraws the data inline in the list, but changing views or resorting still causes a full reload).

Other AJAX pages in Plaxo Online include our eCards site (the most modern and by-the-book AJAX implementation we've done), "My Plaxo" (a dashboard of your information and recent activity, each component of which is dynamically loaded, and which lets you grant permissions to your contacts dynamically like clicking on stars in Netflix), our premium Address Book Optimizer tool (aka the "super de-deduper"), and the web version of our Update Contacts Wizard (which loads your address book and proceeds through a multi-page wizard all with JavaScript and DHTML).

I say "AJAX-like" above because we've actually been building dynamically updating web pages in Plaxo Online since early 2003, which is well before the current wave of enthusiasm and related design patterns emerged. [Inside Plaxo, we generally refer to all these techniques as "remote scripting", which I believe we picked up from reading that great, (relatively) old ADC article (this was before "AJAX" was coined).] The fact that we're often loading and displaying thousands of contacts or calendar events forced us from early on to consider alternatives to reloading everything from scratch any time the user clicked an action. There were two techniques we used early on (and still use) with good results: (1) outputing data from the CGI as JavaScript and then drawing the actual HTML client side; and (2) communicating asynchronously with the server via hidden iFrames.

The first technique is basically a clever compression technique (why download redundant HTML 1000x when you can just download the data and expand it client-side 1000x to the full HTML?) but it paved the way for building AJAX-like apps because we were already accustomed to getting JavaScript and dynamically turning it into HTML. The second technique was our pre-XHR AJAX (and is still discussed in various places as an alternative to XHR), though it has certain drawbacks, most of which have been mentioned elsewhere. Interestingly, at first we just loaded HTML pages with their own JavaScript in the iFrames and called that JavaScript onload to update the parent's state/UI. While in retrospect that isn't always as clean as just requesting data and processing it yourself with a callback, it's quite powerful because you can execute arbitrary code and that code itself can be dynamically generated using the results of whatever you just posted. Initially we tried using the DOM methods to dynamically add and update UI, but we quickly found this to be too slow (and inconsistent cross-browser) so we mainly use innerHTML now.

In recent months, with the renewed excitement around AJAX (and having hired a few more amazing web engineers), we've re-doubled our efforts in building up a solid framework for building dynamic web apps. This includes all of the fun topics discussed on Ajaxian and elsewhere: good coding style for building and maintaining complex, modular code (we use a mix of techniques from Atlas like registerNamespaces, prototype's Class.create for declaring classes); robust logging and debugging with JavaScript (venkman and MS Script Debugger are both helpful when used properly, and we're still experimenting with a variety of lighter and heavier logging systems); data exchange formats (as mentioned earlier, we used to load custom html/javascript, and we use XML in some places, but we're now moving towards JSON with a callback wrapper specified on the query sting like Yahoo! does); and so on.

Since we want Plaxo to become a platform that anyone can plug into to "Plaxo-enable" their own apps and web sites (users should be able to maintain a single up-to-date address book and calendar that follow them around everywhere they need it), we've also spent a lot of time recently playing with cross-site security issues. A good example is our Address Book Access widget, which lets you quickly access your address book from many sites around the web. We also use the widget on our own sites: for instance, when you're sending an eCard on ecards.plaxo.com, you can popup a window to select recipients from your address book (the names and e-mail addresses are then filled in for you). Since the client (eCards) is on ecards.plaxo.com and the data-source (popup) is on www.plaxo.com, they're effectively foreign sites (setting document.domain to "plaxo.com" is of little use, as it breaks XHR in Firefox, at least pre-1.5, and we wanted a client-side solution without resorting to hosted proxies to call foreign sites, not to mention that non-plaxo.com sites also need to be able to use the widget). Even more challenging, we wanted the Plaxo Online popup to be able to auto-fill the form on the eCards site, but this is not possible using any straightforward approach (especially if we want to keep the majority of the code on www.plaxo.com so we can rev it as needed and minimize the burden on the client implementor). Currently we accomplish this with a rather abstruse (but well-founded) technique that our founder Todd Masonis refers to affectionately as "the JavaScript wormhole" involving nested iframes and dynamically-generated JavaScript, the details of which I think I'll save for their own article. But we're now working on other (less scary) solutions like JSON with callbacks, which seems like a very promising way to avoid cross-site security restrictions while still keeping everything client-side. [I'll be talking more about our experiences with cross-site AJAX issues at OSCON this year, and I hope to see you there!]

Which brings me to the point of this rambling: It's been great to see how the budding community of AJAX developers appears rather eager to share tips and recipes. We'd like to share more of our (hard-learned) lessons from Plaxo too (blogs like Ajaxian seem like a good forum for that exchange). This is still an immature and quickly developing arena, and we're all in this together, so the more we can learn from each other's trial and error, the quicker we can all make progress. In particular, two areas that we think deserve more attention are cross-site communication and authentication.

The web-2.0 vision of sites consuming each other's services as mashups will only be realized if we can work out good design patterns for passing data back and forth between different domains. It's one thing to slap a Google map on your page (which is essentially a black box), but it's another thing to have a rich 2-way data-driven interaction with a foreign site (e.g. search your Plaxo address book for contacts that live in Mountain View and plot them on a map). In the latter case you can't use XHR or iframes, so you have to use something like JSON-with-callback (or proxy your RPC using Flash like Yahoo! does with its new maps). It seems like most existing web services are designed for server-side consumption, but this doesn't scale as well as a client-side solution, nor is it as flexible.

Another problem we deal with routinely at Plaxo but that hasn't really hit the AJAX community is user-authentication to access private data. Most REST-ful web services are stateless and just retrieve public data from URLs. But this doesn't work if you want to let a user sign in and access their own address book. The two main issues are (1) how/when do you make users sign in (or check that they're already signed in), and (2) how to let a 3rd-party make authenticated calls on behalf of a user (ideally without having to store the user's password). The best (and pretty much only) example we've seen of progress in this area comes from Flickr, but their solution is pretty heavy-weight--they force you to sign in on Flickr's site (no REST login) to get a token, and they force you to sign all your query params with the auth token once you have it. These are both great ideas for ensuring security, but they're cumbersome to implement (particularly in JavaScript) and they don't let 3rd-party clients have embedded signin UI, which in some cases would provide a better user experience. [Google also seems to be dabbling in this area with GData, though as of this writing it's mostly still TBD.] Just like with the cross-site issue, I'm sure that if more sites grapple publicly with authentication we'll see some promising alternatives and gradually reach a synthesis of best practices.

This turned into a longer write-up than I'd originally planned, but the summary is we're excited about Ajax and Web 2.0 at Plaxo, we've done a lot of work so far to push the envelope of what's possible, and we're looking forward to pushing it further in collaboration with the community.

-- Joseph Smarr

It's not surprising much of the discussion we've heard about Plaxo has been around our recent HipCal acquisition. Blogger comments range from "exciting acquisition" to "stupid acquisition". Here are a few links to some of those discussions as well as other comments that mention Plaxo from the past couple of weeks.

• Plaxo
  A nice little write-up on Plaxo Basic and Plaxo Premium by a blogger.  It's worth mentioning the Plaxo Premium is available for a 30 day trial.

• Plaxo buys Hipcal
  More buzz about our HipCal acquisition.  This user sees the value of Plaxo and can't wait to see what becomes of greater calendar integration.

• TechCrunch Plaxo Acquires Calendar Startup HipCal
  People chime in on their thoughts about Plaxo's acquisition of HipCal.

• Tech Support Guy Forums
  Unfortunately, a user reports a problem with running Plaxo, but Todd comes to the rescue!

• Exporting Outlook Contacts Folders - Solution
  User discusses an interesting use for Plaxo to solve a problem with Outlook.

• Jargon Watch and Code Sludge
  User writes about his experience with the beta version of Plaxo for Mac.

• Plaxo: We'll Spam You Less!
  Brian Carnell's understanding of Plaxo may not be completely accurate, but his criticisms are understandable as a result of the 'acquaintance spam' problem. 

• FeedDemon 2 owner
  Stuart wants to be able to subscribe to his Plaxo calendar through iCal.  Our recent HipCal acquisition should help!

• plaxo_love++
  From someone we previously heard from, who now writes: "Plaxo does blogging right".  Aw shucks, Thanks!.

• disruptive companies: plaxo
  A recent interview with one of our Product Managers, Mark Jen who answers questions about Plaxo.

• Exporting Outlook Contacts Folders - Solution
  One user writes how Plaxo can be used as a solution for exporting Outlook Contact folders.

• Plaxo thinks e-cards offer competitive advantage
  One blogger comments that ecards are so 1997 and questions why we think they are compelling enough for people to upgrade to Plaxo Premium.

• Google should partner with Plaxo to sync with Outlook
  This user wants to see the new Google calendar synchronized with Outlook and suggests that Google partner with Plaxo to achieve this.

• Triton Thorns
  One user is not happy with AIM Triton and wonders what is Plaxo.

• Who Is Plaxo Buying?
  Om Malik was the first to break the "rumor" of Plaxo's acquisition a few days before it become public.

• The AJAX Acquisitions Are Underway
  Another post about our HipCal acquisition.

• To Whom It May Concern: Here's My Calendar
  Internetnew.com article on Plaxo acquisition of HipCal.

As always, we'd like to encourage people to share their thoughts, comments, and experience with Plaxo by blogging about it. We're listening and will use the feedback to improve the Plaxo service. Perhaps we'll highlight your blog here next time :-).

The reaction to Plaxo’s acquisition of Hipcal across the blogosphere has, for the most part, been extremely positive. We’re glad to see this, since we think the HipCal calendar application (and team) are fantastic, and will bring great value to our users.
However, a few people have asked why this makes business sense, especially since Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! all have offerings in this space, and since there are a large number of standalone calendar offerings.

So, here are some quick answers to the following :

1. Why does this make sense for Plaxo Users?


2. Why does this make business sense for Plaxo?


3. How can you compete with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft in this area

1)Why does this make sense for Plaxo Users?
Plaxo provides users with a Smart Address Book that enables them to stay up-to-date, organized, and in-touch with the people that they care about.

To date, we’ve focused most of our efforts on the contact list, enabling:

1. Staying in touch with your data: Users keep a single set of contact information for friends, colleagues, and customers that can be used virtually anywhere, and that stays synchronized across multiple different platforms and accounts (e.g. Yahoo, Outlook, AIM, Mac, PC, mobile phones, and a number of online services)


2. Staying in touch with people: As friends who also use Plaxo move, change jobs, have birthdays, get new phone numbers, change e-mail addresses, etc.—we make sure that you know, and that your smart address book gets automatically, everywhere you use it.

That said, it has always been our conviction that address book and calendar should be intimately connected tools for staying organized and for managing relationships with the important people in ones life. So, we think it is natural—if not essential-- for us to offer calendar functionality – and have that calendar functionality deeply intertwined with the address book. In fact, for over a year, we’ve had a calendar that does the “Staying in touch with your Data” piece of the equation. (For example, you can edit and maintain your calendar at work in Outlook, and at home from your mobile, various online services, etc.) But…we haven’t enabled the “Staying in touch with people” part of the equation.

With the HipCal acquisition, we will solve this problem. We want to make it easy for you to coordinate setting appointments with other people, set up get-togethers, publish or subscribe to your kid's soccer team schedule, get automatic updates on the schedule for your favorite band, etc.

2)Why does this make sense for Plaxo’s business?

It’s pretty simple. Plaxo makes money when a percentage of our free users convert to premium services and pay a subscription fee. We also make money when our free users choose to send ecards, flowers, or gifts to each other, when they launch a search from Plaxo, when they see an ad on Plaxo, etc.

HipCal gives us:

• More reasons for people to join Plaxo


• More reasons for current users to stay active


• More opportunities to get people to use Plaxo on a daily basis


• More opportunities to launch new premium services

It also gives us five great new members for the Plaxo team.

3) How can you compete with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft in this area?

The short answer is that we won’t really be competing with them. All of those services currently offer address books. We don’t compete with their address books…we simply make them more useful and interoperable. To some extent, the same should be true with calendars.

Beyond that, though, I think it is clear that standalone, web-based calendars aren’t all that useful. A calendar application, even if it has lots of interesting features and a great interface, can’t exist as an island.

To be really useful, a calendaring application will need all of the following:

1. Tight integration into and with the other personal productivity tools people already use


2. The ability to be used anytime, anywhere, across multiple different tools


3. A large network of other users with whom you can set appointments, get together, etc.


4. And, of course, fantastic features and a great interface

Plaxo has already made a lot of progress on 1, 2, and 3. HipCal helps us really accelerate item #4. If a Plaxo member chooses to use one of the services listed above as their primary tool for calendaring—that’s great! We’ll simply help them integrate their calendaring experience with other tools and with other users.

For more on what people are saying, see:

Our press release
Internet News
The Daily Om
Red Herring
Techcrunch