Howdy folks,

As many of you have noticed, Microsoft recently produced an RTM version of the new Office 2007, including a new Outlook. With this new version you'll see Microsoft added some new UI, particularly in the toolbars and the Contacts folder. Unfortunately, the existing versions of the Plaxo Toolbar for Outlook and Outlook Express only half-work with this new version. The synchronization should all work, as well as our own Plaxo UI that is generally triggerred from the menu or toolbar. However, some areas where we integrate with Outlook's UI, such as the Click-To-Connect buttons in e-mail, the Card View of Outlook's Contacts, and the view of the contact's details when a contact is opened, are not compatible with this new version.

Not to worry, however, for a new version of our toolbar is on its way! This version will be compatible with this newest Outlook offerring as well as all previous versions that we currently support.

Here are a couple screenshots of this work-in-progress. First, is the Click-To-Connect button in Outlook 2007's preview window:

And the new Contacts summary view:

While I can't give an exact timeframe, we hope to have this new version ready in a few weeks or so. If you'd be interested in helping us out and giving an alpha or beta version of this new toolbar a try before the official release, we'd love to hear from you - just write in at forum.plaxo.com or to the Plaxo Yahoo! group.

The "Send an eCard" button in the Plaxo Outlook Toolbar is one of the places we let you know what holidays are coming up. Our latest button design pays tribute to the great American family holiday, Thanksgiving. Clicking on any one of the seasonal eCard buttons will take you directly to our Plaxo eCard category for that holiday. Be sure to check out our new Thanksgiving eCard designs!

You'll need our latest client and to have the preference enabled in order to see the button (it's on by default):

1. Go to Plaxo->Preferences
2. Click on the Advanced Tab
3. Make sure the 'Display "Send an eCard" Button' checkbox is checked
4. Click OK.

(You can use the same preference to disable the button if you don't want to see it).

If you have the latest client release, have the preference enabled, and you're not seeing the button, then try restarting Outlook.

In case you don't spend your days staring at Outlook as much as we do, we've been quietly changing the eCard button design from week to week. You might've seen the image of a little pumpkin on the button in the days leading up to Halloween. During that period, we noticed a large but unexplained spike in our eCards signups. Then we looked at where the new users were coming from, and we realized the pumpkin was a huge hit! Thousands of members got into the "spirit" of things and sent spooky eCards to their friends and family.

Thanksgiving and the winter holidays are right around the corner. Don't forget to send holiday greetings to your friends, co-workers and loved ones. Browse through the collection often; we add new card designs every month.

As always, we offer free eCards - just look for the word "FREE" on the image. If you want to pick from our premium design collection or to upload your own photo and send it as an eCard, you can sign up for our free 30-day Premium eCard trial.

--the product manager formerly known as the QA Engineer Hong Kwon

Whoa, it had been a while since we checked the stats on our Address Book Access Widget, and that thing is really taking off! The graph shows the monthly usage of the widget across all web sites that host it, and as you can see we're now helping over 250 thousand users access their address book data on other web sites every month. And the graph is, as our marketing guy John likes to say, "up and to the right". :-)

There are dozens of web sites of all sizes using the widget these days, but the two that currently drive the most activity are YouTube and Gaia Online. YouTube was actually one of our earliest widget users; I still remember showing an alpha prototype to Chad back in December 05. Even though the UI was still a bit rough, he immediately grokked what we were doing and was excited to use it for his "up and coming video sharing web site". YouTube's success is an inspiration to us all, and we'd like to think that Plaxo contributed in some small way to their meteoric rise in popularity during this year.

Gaia Online is one of our newest widget users, but they are already sending the widget more traffic than any site except YouTube. If you haven't seen it, Gaia Online is a virtual world with Avatars and quests, as well as the world's largest bulletin board system. The service is so popular that its users regularly donate money to the site, even though most of them are under 18! The founders of Gaia came and visited Plaxo for lunch this fall. After showing us a demo of Gaia Online that blew us away, they said they were interested in using our widget so their members could invite their friends to join Gaia. I sent an e-mail later that afternoon with instructions for hooking up the widget, and they replied that it was already done and would launch the next day!

Behind the scenes, getting the widget to fill data from Plaxo's domain to the site hosting the widget button led us to develop a new cross-site mashup technique, which we affectionaly refer to as "The JavaScript Wormhole". The talks we gave about this work at OSCON (ppt) and MashupCamp (ppt, video) have generated a lot of discussion, and we're excited to participate as this new field continues to develop.

In the meantime, if your web site lets your users invite their friends, share content, or build a social network, please consider taking advantage of Plaxo's widget. Your users will thank you and, who knows, it might even turn your site into the next YouTube! ;)

--Joseph Smarr, Architect / maker of widgets

Signs of the times: Stock markets hitting all-time highs. Pre-profit Silicon Valley startups selling for more than a billion dollars. And entrepreneurs being treated like rock stars!

Literally.

Yep. The latest issue of Rolling Stone just hit the stands, and our very own Todd Masonis is featured prominently in an article entitled "The Baby Billionaires of Silicon Valley." You'll have to run down to your local newstand to see the full article, but here's a link to a preview on the magazine's website.