Thanks to everyone that came to Lunch 2.0 last week at Plaxo! Over 300 of you showed up to eat, drink, converse, and check your pulse. A bunch of people grabbed plaxo pulse t-shirts, and we even saw people wearing them at BarCampBlock this weekend. Best of all, everyone was enthusiastic about opening up the social web and putting users back in control of who they know.

There are already some great write-ups posted by Jeremiah Owyang, John McCrea, and others, and of course there are lots of photos to browse. A big thanks to everyone at Plaxo who worked so hard to make this event great, and thanks to everyone in the Lunch 2.0 community for joining us and eating our lunch! :)

It’s very exciting to see Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordon’s thoughts on the Social Graph make it into the public discourse. I’ve been talking off and on with them about the open social web for most of the year, and it’s impressive to see how quickly things are materializing. It also echoes the growing desire that both users and developers have for freeing their data from walled gardens and putting users back in control of who they know. This is something we’re actively working on at Plaxo, and there’s still a lot more to do!

First of all, we agree emphatically with several of the points Brad and David make:

• Users are frustrated that they have to re-build their friends list on every new site they go to, and this also impedes the development of new socially-enabled applications.


• The answer is NOT to have one company own the social graph and require all apps to be re-built on top of a proprietary platform in order to gain access to it.


• We have to help users regain control now, and we can’t assume that all social sites will be cooperative (at least right away), nor can we wait for everyone to agree on a single interop spec.


• Users care about enhanced functionality and convenience being delivered, not about any particular standards or data formats (per se).


• Users won’t generally want all the same friends on all the sites they use, but they do want to know when anyone they know on a given site is also using other sites they also use. In other words, the goal is to aggregate who you know across all the sites you use and then let you choose who to connect to where in what capacity.

Looking at things through the lens of Plaxo, which helps 15+ million people around the world keep track of who they know by syncing their existing address books across the many tools they use, there are also a few additional points we think are important to make:

• While having an open-source, non-profit entity collecting and serving the entire social graph may be better than a single proprietary company or a mess of disconnected companies, we think the ultimate solution has to be that each user owns and controls their own profile and list of friends. Different people will trust different companies to act on their behalf as stewards of their online identity and relationships, but no single entity should ever have to be the gatekeeper for the entire world.


• Our users tell us that the contents of their address book are private and that preserving their privacy is very important. So while some users are happy to declare their list of friends in an open and public way, we feel that dealing with private data is essential, and certainly much more than “10% of the problem”. I think there are ways to separate the details of authentication from the exchange of info, but it’s worth noting that wanting your data to be portable doesn’t mean you want (or need) it to be public—it is sufficient that you can move your data between two trusted parties without those parties needing to agree explicitly a priori to inter-operate.


• Linking and crawling the graph of URLs that describe your profile on different sites to aggregate your profile and friends lists is a great idea (and one we intend to support in Plaxo Pulse). But for many users, e-mail addresses in address books is still the de facto standard for representing their relationships, and we believe supporting linking by e-mail address in the open social web will still be important for the foreseeable future. These are complementary techniques of course, and they can be partially unified by using mbox_sha1sum and similar tricks, but the basic process that most social networks use today of “give me your e-mail address book, and I’ll tell you who you know on this site based on their e-mail address” should not be overlooked. Sites will differ on how much access they give you to other users’ e-mail addresses, but I think there are ways to make it work that may actually be simpler than assuming that profile URLs are the main identifiers to deal with.

These are exciting times and I’m thrilled to see so many people getting involved in these important discussions. You can count on Plaxo to stay involved, both in the discussion and as a service that will support emerging open standards and best practices for keeping users in control. It’s hard to say yet how this will all turn out, but it’s great to see the momentum building for the opening up of the social web.

Over the last few months a few of us here at Plaxo have been working hard on a little project called Pulse (press release found here). Well, word got out about it a little early and people were getting a little hot and bothered in the blogosphere for anything that looks like it could take on big daddy Facebook.

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/08/plaxo-to-launch.html
http://scobleizer.com/2007/08/02/the-latest-shiny-social-objec...
http://valleywag.com/tech/social-networks/plaxo-pulse-adds-to-our-soc...

Let me tell you up front that this isn’t our intention. I love Facebook and I’ll probably never stop using it.

I sign in at least 10 times a day to see what all of my high school and college friends are up to. I constantly update my status, upload photos, and have spent dozens of dollars sending oh so stupid “gifts” to my friends. Facebook has totally nailed it. So what’s the problem?

I will never add my mom as a friend on Facebook.

You see, I’m 22, and I’ve been part of the “Facebook Generation” since 2003 when it spread like wildfire on the campus of RPI. Facebook is a place for me and my college friends. I’ve created a persona that doesn’t reflect my family or professional life. I don’t want my mom or potential employers seeing the Halloween pictures of me wearing a turquoise tank top that says “Mrs. Timberlake” in pink glitter. She’d have to go to therapy and I’d have to hit up the unemployment line.

So how is Pulse different?

Your friends and family are creating great online content everyday: photos, videos, restaurant reviews, and a lot more. The problem is that it’s scattered over hundreds of sites and you have no idea when it gets updated. Pulse is a social network for your REAL life. When you connect to someone, you categorize them as a friend, family member, or in your business network. You tell us which sites you already use, and through the power of RSS and APIs we’ll pull in whatever you update and share it with who you tell us to (your family, your real friends, or your business network).

Here are the sites we have so far: Amazon.com, AOL Pictures, Del.icio.us, Digg, Flickr, Jaiku, Last.fm, LiveJournal, MySpace, Picasa, Pownce, Smugmug, Tumblr, Twitter, Webshots, Windows Live Spaces, Xanga, Yahoo! 360, Yelp, and YouTube. (we’ll be adding many more soon)

We want to work WITH Facebook, Digg, YouTube, and every site to connect you to the people you care about. That has always been Plaxo’s goal. I want to drive traffic to Facebook (you’re welcome, Zuck), I hope we get a ton more people reviewing businesses on Yelp, and I pray that there are so many tweets being twitted on Twitter that the internet will slow to a crawl. We want you to be able to share everything from anywhere on the web and we want you to be able to do whatever you want with it. They’re your contacts, it’s your information, and we’re going to do everything we can so that you control it.

Welcome to the open social web. We think you’ll like it here.

--Pete Curley, Product Manager of Pulse

PS. The version of Pulse you see today is a culmination of about 2 months of work from conception to launch (written on top of the totally revamped Plaxo infrastructure, Plaxo 3.0 that we worked so hard on for the last year). That means we didn’t get some things finished that we had wanted to: better profiles, search functionality, RSS feeds from Pulse to the outside world (what use is the open social web if you can’t get your data to anywhere you want?) Oh, yes, and we need to work with the community to develop an open standard that will “open up the social graph,” so you can take your friends list with you wherever you go.

If you have any sites you’d like to see in Pulse, or questions about it in general, feel free to email me at pete@plaxo.com.

Pulse Screenshots

Well, anticipation is running high for our upcoming unveiling of the next-generation social network from Plaxo, called Pulse. (Okay, the blogosphere is really a little over the top with the speculation about the implications of this launch. See the post from Robert Scoble that started the ball rolling.)

But this is a really big moment for Plaxo and for our 15+ million members, and all the attention has certainly inspired some great effort from the developers working to get the product ready for launch. Today, I looked over and saw the team huddled around in an impromptu "scrum" and decided to capture it with my camera. Here are the pics.

It's hard to believe it's been over a year since we last had a Lunch 2.0 at Plaxo! After all, three of the four founders are current or former Plaxites! (read: a bunch of us liked getting free food at other companies, heh.) And so much has happened since then: we released an all-new Plaxo, we moved to a new building, and we built a new social web app. So it's high-time we had everyone back over to celebrate with us!

You can get all the details at lunch 2.0 and then RSVP on upcoming. You'll have the run of the office, the food will be yummy, and you'll get to hang out with a bunch of fellow tech and food enthusiasts. See you there!

--Joseph Smarr, open lunch hacker