So much of the value created in Silicon Valley is in the ethereal realm of ideas: algorithms, applications, websites, and all manner of “intellectual property”. At times, it seems that the physical world is of little consequence; that imagination, ingenuity, caffeine-fueled keyboarding (and a fair bit of luck) are all that matter here. Indeed, when you look at most high tech companies, very little of their value is found in physical assets. What really matters is the people working there and what is in their heads.

So, it always comes as a surprise to me whenever the physical world asserts itself back into the Silicon Valley equation, as it has begun to once again, some six years after the Web 1.0 Bubble burst, taking with it the local commercial real estate market. Though many gleaming glass structures remain empty, for those within scooter distance of the Googleplex, things are feeling a bit frothy. To accommodate its continued growth, Google is buying up every decent property in its neighborhood (even including the building that we are in).

View from Plaxo: Some Valuable Silicon Valley Dirt

So, this post is to the forgotten part of Silicon Valley, the dirt beneath our feet. It keeps changing hands, as wave after wave of innovation sees the rise of one type of company – and the fall of another. When people visit or drive past Google today, I imagine that most assume the colorful, playful buildings were designed specifically for Larry, Sergey, and the other Googlenauts. But those who’ve been around for a while know that complex was built in a different time, for a different “hottest company in the Valley” – for Silicon Graphics in the heyday of the workstation market (in the early ‘90’s).

It will be interesting to watch the continued transformation around us. What I know for sure is that the amount of land is finite, and that the competition of ideas played out upon its surface is in a constant state of change.

-John McCrea, VP of Marketing

Hi from Portland! I've been here all week at OSCON 2006, the annual O'Reilly Open Source Conference, as has fellow Plaxite Terry Chay. It's been a lively and action-packed event (read as: none of us are getting much sleep). I gave a talk about Cross-Site Ajax on Wednesday afternoon, and it generated quite a lively discussion afterwards, featuring some key people from Mozilla and Google (this is why it's so cool to talk at a place like OSCON!).

Here are the slides from my talk, which include (among other things), some helpful links for more info on cross-site browser issues and the proposals others have made for making things better. Kevin Yank blogged a detailed summary of my talk, which subsequently got picked up by Ajaxian and others. Since one of the main points in my talk was "we need to talk more publicly about these issues", I'm glad to see that my presentation has already sparked some fresh discussion!

Thanks to everyone that came to my talk or met me in the hallways or at dinner. I was impressed an inspired to see how intelligent, thoughtful, passionate, and real the people at OSCON were. I can't wait to return next year (this was my first OSCON). If you missed OSCON (or even if you didn't), check out the OSCON photos on flickr and extensive coverage in the blogosphere.

--Joseph Smarr

P.S. The lovely and talented Caitlin recorded my talk in HD video, so we'll post the edited video when it's ready.

P.P.S I started writing this post last Thursday afternoon, but I'm just finishing it now because Anil and Brad kept me up past my bedtime at the SixApart party (thanks, guys! ;)).

I had a great time this week at Mashup Camp, which started with a presentation I gave at Mashup University about using our widget and sync API to smarten up your web site's address book. Several people have asked me for a copy of my slides from that talk, so here they are! (PPT, 1.7MB; also available as PDF, but you won't see the cool animations, heh!) For more info, be sure to check out our Plaxo developer pages at www.plaxo.com/api. I also ran a Mashup Camp sesison on aggregating profile data from across the web.

In addition to helping get the word out about Plaxo's resources for mashup developers, I met a lot of people at Mashup Camp that are working on exciting projects, including Danny Thorpe and Trevin Chow from Windows Live, Scott Isaacs of DHTML/Atlas fame (who has taught me a ton about web development over the years, but I'd never met), Kaliya Hamlin and Johannes Ernst, who are doing great work on user-centric identity (a problem that will become increasingly important for Plaxo users as people store more and more of their information on different sites across the Internet and want to collect and sync it all), Joe "Duck" Hunkins, who blogged most of Mashup University and Mashup Camp, and many more.

It's really energizing to see so many smart and passionate people working towards a common goal of making it easier for people to quickly build rich web experiences that can be used by anybody. We're proud to be contributing our own little piece to this noble cause!

--Joseph Smarr

PS: Fore more coverage of Mashup Camp, check out the wiki pages for the Mashup Camp sessions, the flickr photos, blog posts, and the Mercury News article.

In our continuing quest to save the world from not-another-disconnected-address-book-itis, I'm presenting a talk at Mashup University this Tuesday, July 11th, at 11:30am at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I'll demonstrate how to use Plaxo's Address Book Access Widget and REST-ful Sync API to enable your site to give its users access to their existing address book (wherever it may be), as well as explain some of the technical challenges Plaxo dealt with while creating these mashups.

MashupU will be followed by Mashup Camp 2, which many of us at Plaxo will be attending, including Mark Jen and our founders Todd & Cam. Apparently MashupU has filled up its 150 available attendee slots and MashupCamp has closed registration at 400+ seats! So if you're coming to either of these, please stop by and say hi, and if you couldn't make it, don't worry, we'll post a wrap-up when it's all done.

Here's the description of the talk:

Nearly all new web applications have a strong social component: sharing content with your friends, growing by invitation, and building reputations and ratings. Unfortunately, this means that many services are asking their users to build and maintain yet-another-address-book on each site they visit. As a result, these address books are usually incomplete and quickly become out-of-date, which is bad for both the sites and their users. Plaxo has built a “smart address book” that automatically stays in sync with the address books members already use—including Outlook, Mac, Thunderbird, AIM, and Yahoo. A few lines of JavaScript is all it takes to create a Plaxo mashup that lets people import and select contacts to be added in to their address books at any web site or application. Sites wishing for an even more integrated experience can implement Plaxo’s full REST-based sync and access APIs. In this session, we’ll talk about how to take advantage of Plaxo’s widgets and APIs, and I’ll discuss some of the underlying technology that makes these mashups possible.

UPDATE: I've posted my slides from the talk.

A couple months ago, the rumblings began about a cool new care package club, Valleyschwag. They had weekly Monday morning Cereal Bar parties and mailed monthly bags of loot to members.

Perfect timing because we had just the thing on hand -a soon-to-be extinct item- a bunch of tees with the Plaxo logo/Plaxo man (or Plaxo woman on the woman's tee). Plaxo has very little schwag and it's limited to employees only. And later this year, we're unveiling a new look and logo so these tees are almost, already a collector's item (OK, I'm in PR, they're almost obsolete).

Sorry Goodwill, but my never-worn-in-the-back-of-the-closet conference tees are now going elsewhere. Looking forward to meeting the rest of the Valleyschwag gang at next Friday’s party!

Thanks to Bloglines search, I noticed today that an enterprising Plaxo member has created a Plaxo widget for Netvibes. If you haven't heard of Netvibes, it is a very spiffy AJAX start page where you can view info from different sites in one spot. Many of us at Plaxo use Netvibes daily, so we're happy to see Plaxo become one of the available modules. In fact, this was going to be my next haxo project, but I guess one of our members beat us to it :)

If you are a developer and are interested in building Plaxo widgets for other sites or your own pages, you should check out our developer's page. We have a number of open APIs to play with (and more to come later) as well as a quick-import widget that makes it incredibly easy to import contacts from Plaxo as well as other popular address books like Outlook, Yahoo!, Hotmail, and Gmail. You may also want to check out our Thunderbird Plug-in, which is open source, built on our open API, and serves as a good example of how to build on top of Plaxo.

We'll also be hosting a mashup class at Mashup U (more on this later) and we hope to see many of you there!