... sometimes you have no choice to change along with him. (Or at least pick matching curtains).

Case in point: Apple recently released their latest version of MacOS X, "Leopard," to general distribution last week. Immediately, our customers noticed that a lot of the nifty Plaxo integration we'd done with the address book no longer worked.

To spare you all the gory details, some of the internals that we used to integrate with the address book changed in Leopard. This is something we've known from some of the later betas, and our lead Mac engineer, Drew, has been working feverishly to remedy this since then.

The good news is that by early next week, you will be able to download the latest version of Plaxo for Mac which works (again) with Leopard. The one feature that is currently still missing in action is the ability to see Plaxo member icons in the address list. Yep, we know about it, and we're working on fixing it.

So sit tight, and in the meantime, happy halloween!

You've probably seen the news somewhere else first, but making it official here: Plaxo is a part of a large and growing team effort to make the social web as open as the web itself. Now, instead of developers having to build different versions of their apps for each social or business network, they can write once, using the new OpenSocial APIs from Google, and have their apps run all over the open social web. Sites as diverse at Plaxo Pulse, LinkedIn, Hi5, and Friendster are supporting the effort.

Joseph and Cam have worked really hard to make sure we are at the forefront of the effort, and we expect to have full support later this week for the new APIs in the just-launched Dynamic Profiles in Pulse.

Very exciting!

In the latest weekly release for Pulse, we’ve added another feature that many of you around the world have been asking for – a way to take your aggregated stream of feeds out of Pulse and into your blog (or any web page) with a simple widget. It’s called the “lifestreaming widget,” and you can set it up in seconds.

Just go to http://pulse.plaxo.com/pulse/widget.

You can include all of your external feeds (from any of the 30 or so sites Pulse can pull from, like Flickr, Twitter, Jaiku, your Amazon wish list, Yelp, Digg, etc.). Or, if you prefer, you can limit it to just the ones that you’ve marked as “public” in Pulse.

Then, just cut-and-paste the javascript snippet into the HTML of the page you want to display your widget. That’s it!

Here's mine:

To protect privacy the lifestream feed does not include any contact info, comments, or Pulse connections. It’s just the aggregation of my external feeds (the stuff I’m posting all over the web and choosing to bring into Pulse).

John McCrea
VP of Marketing

Pulse may still be in fairly early stages of beta, but the pace of work to round out the feature set is feverish. This week's release has two key features that people have been asking for.

The first will be of interest to all of the users of the localized version of the service. If you speak Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Chinese, or Japanese, you can now build your network with localized versions of invites and connection requests. For those who've eagerly awaiting this capability, we appreciate your patience!

The second feature will ultimately be of interest to all Pulse users, but in the beginning will be most appreciated by folks who now have a large number of active Pulse users in their network, and who have amassed a large archive from their river of "lifestreams." (For example, I have over 1,000 pages of content that have come to me from family, friends, and folks in my business network.) The feature is Search, and it allows you to mine all that content, searching by keyword across all events and comments that have come your way. It's just our first release of Search, and there's a lot more to add, but already it's a big hit with power users.

Now, two more reasons to check your Pulse.

In June we introduced the public beta of an all-new Plaxo, and we’ve been working hard ever since to get it ready for a full migration for all users. Plaxo 3.0 bridges the gap between the most popular communications tools and services across the web. This "sync and share" vision allows our users to synchronize their address book, calendars, tasks and notes to more sync points than ever before - like Hotmail, Google Mail, Yahoo! Mail and LinkedIn - with more on the way. These will now join the familiar sync points we've supported in the past (Outlook, Outlook Express, Macintosh Address Book, Thunderbird, AOL and AIM).

In addition to more support of third party web applications, we're also launching the next generation social network, Pulse. Unlike other social networks, Pulse is built from your own address book, a true social network where you can selectively share and converse with people you really know and care about. Pulse feeds you information about your contacts from a growing list of social web sites they use. This aggregation of life news about the people you truly know builds on the idea of keeping you connected.

And with the introduction of these new features of Plaxo 3.0, we remain faithful to our Privacy Principles because it's what you would continue to expect when sharing your personal information. Simply put, these principles comprise of:

• Control over your information,


• Freedom from unwanted communications, and


• Trust that your information will not be shared or sold.

Having already one of the strongest privacy polices in the industry, we continue the effort to keep the policy simple, easy to understand and clear on in its intent. And of course, our privacy practices will continue to be validated and certified by one of the most trusted third party privacy watchdog, TRUSTe.

In the spirit of openness, we’d like to explain some minor changes we’ve made to the Privacy Policy with the launch of Plaxo 3.0.

Expanded Synchronization Functionality
Because we've expanded the Plaxo service's sync capabilities to include sync with third party web applications like GMail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail and a growing list of additional end points, we now need to maintain your credentials to those third party web services. As a result, the definition of "Your Account Information" has been expanded to cover these passwords for third party services; it has also been expanded to cover profile information such as photos and physical location.

Lost Password and Password Reset
One of the big changes we made was our Password Renewal Process. In the old process, a user attempting to reset their lost password would have to answer a security question (set by the user during registration) before we would send an email to user's registered email address. This email would contain a link to a secure page where the user can reset their password. This 2-stage approach required that the user remembered their security answer as well as have access to their registered email address. The failure rate, and user complaints, on the renewal process was very high because users would often forget their security answer.

As we studied how the industry handled the lost-password problem, we soon realized that many of the big ISPs and ecommerce sites used a much simpler email round-trip confirmation approach. It's essentially like our previous approach, but without asking a security answer. And because the password renewal process on partner sites used this same round-trip confirmation method, we decided to adopt it. Through a lengthy beta test, user complaints are non-existent and password reset requests have a high success rate.

Other Clarifications
Finally, different sections of the Privacy Policy have been expanded to further clarify their intent, based on questions, feedbacks and suggestions from members, enterprise partners and privacy advocates.

• We clarified the use of aggregated and anonymous demographic information with our business partners for purposes such as spam and fraud prevention. However, no such information will be linked directly to your personally identifiable information. You may elect not to have Your Information used for such purposes.


• We may use Your Information (which is, collectively, your account information, your contact list and PIM information) to better provide you with personalized content programming, instructions and services, for license reporting, to better understand our product usage on an aggregated basis, to verify access rights, to provide you with information about Plaxo and to allow you to purchase and use Plaxo.


• We clarified that our Privacy Policy also applies to data from people using our services through third parties integrating Plaxo functionality through our application programmer interfaces ("APIs") or otherwise.


• We clarified the Rights of Others (Your Contact List) who may fail to recognize you as a known contact and what actions Plaxo may take.

As our company continues to grow and provide compelling new features, it’s imperative that we uphold the same values and principles that got us here. You can find out more about our privacy pledge by visiting our Privacy page. This page contains anything and everything that you need to know about our Privacy Policy, a history of changes to the policy and other resources to help you better understand our position on data ownership and security safeguards, as well as helpful frequently asked questions specific to the matter.

If you have any questions, concerns or feedbacks, please feel free to contact me at redgee @t plaxo.com or visit the Privacy and Security section in our community forums and join a public discussion – I’ll see you there. Finally, I hope that you give the new Plaxo 3.0 a test drive. It’s our best one yet.

Redgee Capili
Sr. Director Client Services &
Chief Privacy Officer

Okay, just a little bit. Now that I have your attention:

The team’s been busy cookin’ up another weekly feature release. There’s been a lot of behind-the-scenes work that you won’t directly see, like improvements to the crawlers. (Expect to see faster updates from Twitter and De.lici.ous, for example).

Some new features you will see, include additional feeds:

Upcoming.org (events your plan to attend)
Bloglines (your Bloglines blog)
Facebook (just “Notes” and “Posted Items” for now)

In addition, we updated the recently-released Groups feature. Now, you can add additional moderators to a group, and moderators can now eject someone from a group.

[Tip for getting more out of Groups: share content into the group! You can connect any of your feeds to any of your groups. And when you use the Share Bar to share a message, a link, or a video clip, your options include sharing it to one or more groups.]

And one feature a lot of you have asked for is now here: the ability to see all the pending connection requests and invites that you’ve sent out.

So, what are you waiting for? Go check your Pulse!