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 As a result, these address books are usually incomplete and quickly become out-of-date, which is bad for both the sites and their users.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.

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.