Pulse Groups? Roll-Your-Own Social Network(s).

We’ve been doing weekly product releases for Pulse since the launch of the service in August. I’m excited about today’s release, more than any other, because it makes it really easy for anyone to roll their own social network. And it thereby allows Pulse to become the hub for interacting with all of the personal social networks that you create (or join) via the Plaxo. What exactly am I talking about? A powerful new feature, called Pulse Groups. Some background: So far, Pulse has helped restore meaning to the word “friend” by not forcing you to use that one word to describe all of your relationships. With Pulse, you categorize each connection you make as “family,” “friend,” “business network,” or some combination of those three. As a result, you can make conscious decisions about what you share with whom. For example, you might choose to share your Picasa photos with family, your Last.fm weekly-most-listened-to bands with friends, and your Dugg stories and Delicious bookmarks with your business network. But such categorization, while useful, only whets the appetite for even more granular control. Why? Because we all participate in a wide variety of real-world circles. The content I want to share with my college friends from the early ‘80’s is markedly different from what I want to share with the circle of friends I interact with here in California today. With today’s release, Pulse now lets you create as many groups as you want. When you create a group, you declare it to be “private,” “moderated,” or “public.” “Public groups” are similar to what you might be familiar with on Facebook, where anyone can see the group and anyone can join. That’s cool and powerful, but personally I am way more excited about the potential in the other two flavors of groups. A “private group” is not publicly visible, and the only way to get into it is by being invited by the creator of the group. I just created two such groups minutes ago. I think everyone should probably do the same (but I’m clearly biased!). “Moderated groups” are similar to private groups, but they’re a bit more visible, and people can request to be let in. The creator of the group has the sole authority to accept or reject. At Plaxo, we just created a private group for all employees. Ever since we launched Pulse, we’ve been wishing we had the ability to internally share news stories, poll questions, and more – and to engage in company-only conversations about that stuff. Until now, we’ve either had to use “friends” as a proxy for Plaxo employees (with obvious drawbacks) – or continue to use clunky old e-mail for such social sharing tasks. Pulse Groups may be our most interesting contribution to the “Office 2.0” trend. Of course, this is just a first release of Groups, and there’s a lot more to add in the coming weeks. Maybe I’m stretching when I say that each group is essentially a personal social network, but that’s clearly where we’re heading. Imagine if we let you stylize and customize what you display on your profile for each group you are in. Aside from this major new feature, today’s Pulse release includes lots of bug fixes and UI improvements. There’s also one other feature we’ve all been clamoring for. It’s “re-sharing.” If you receive some really cool piece of content and you want to forward it, now you can in a couple of clicks. Hope you enjoy the new features! John McCrea VP of Marketing