Plaxo has always been about keeping you connected with the people you know – across an ever-expanding range of tools and services. The goal is to let you have complete access to your address book and calendar everywhere you might need them.
Today, we get a little bit closer to that goal with the release of Plaxo for Windows Mobile. This is a lightweight client that automatically syncs your Windows Mobile Smartphone or PocketPC with your Plaxo address book and calendar -- over the air. (You can sync in cradled mode too.)
This means that if someone schedules a meeting for you in Outlook and your Outlook is synced with Plaxo, that meeting can automatically travel over the air to your phone. No cable required. Added a new contact in Gmail or Yahoo? That contact will now effortlessly appear on your Windows Mobile phone. Without typing on those little keys.
Plaxo for Windows Mobile is a Premium sync endpoint, meaning that you'll need to be a subscriber to Plaxo Premium to sync your Windows Mobile phone with the service. (Not a member? Try it free for 30 days.)
When we launched the beta of Pulse in August, we made a strategic bet -- that the market was ripe for an "open social network" (rather than yet another "walled garden").
The idea was that we could play a role in the emergence of a social web that was as open as the web itself. We embraced and implemented open standards, including OpenID and microformats. We let users bring in content from the sites they were already using, and we let them take their data out through a variety of mechanisms, including RSS and a lifestreaming widget. We advocated for openness and for user-ownership of data by co-authoring a "Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web." And, when Google led the charge for enabling write-once-run-anywhere apps in its OpenSocial API initiative, we did not hesitate; in fact we jumped on board with such enthusiasm that we managed to be the first site with live OpenSocial apps running on it. (Go, Joseph!)
Along the way, Joseph and I were oftened asked, "Open sounds great for users, but will the social networks really open up? Isn't it bad for business?"
Well, the early results are in, and I'd have to say that our experience so far would strongly suggest that "open" is good for business. Here's a chart that shows trends for growth of Pulse's "social graph." Of particular note: the inflection point in the curve coincides with the public revelation of the Google OpenSocial initiative and our role in it. From that moment forward, we have experienced a surge so strong that we had to expedite a hardware order, and shift focus temporarily from new features to scalability.
In a single day, the rate of wiring up the Pulse social graph jumped by an order-of-magnitude. Imagine what will happen when we begin to market this to all the users of the traditional Plaxo "networked address book" service!
Of course, the hard work of enabling a truly Open Social Web is just beginning. There's still much to do to deliver on the promise of the OpenSocial API. We are pleased to be working side-by-side with Google, MySpace, and the many others involved in the initiative to make sure OpenSocial is a secure web-wide platform. In addition, we have begun to tackle in earnest the next big challenge of open -- Friends List Portability. Stay tuned for some exciting developments on that front.
John McCrea
VP of Marketing
Of all the community events working towards an open social web, the most productive and insightful--and the one I look forward to most--is the bi-annual Internet Identity Workshop, held in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. That's where OpenID was really debated and matured to the phenomenon it is today, and it's also where all the people behind related (and would-be competing) ideas like CardSpace, Liberty, Sxip, LID, and so on came together and found a way to converge their visions and work together. It's also where Plaxo learned to deeply understand and embrace open standards, community involvement, user-centric identity, and the crucial balance of idealism and pragmatism required to get an open vision meaningfully deployed in the real world.
All this happens at IIW because the right people are there, and the workshop fosters the right attitude. It's not a traditional conference--it's an un-conference-style workshop hosted and attended by peers. Most of the thought leaders who are developing the new concepts and technologies you've heard about for identity, security, and data-exchange on the web will be there, alongside the people who are bringing those ideas inside AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, and other companies that can deliver these things to millions of users. And there are also individuals and small companies that want to learn about this space more deeply and find out of they contribute to the conversation.
If you're one of those people, you should try to come to IIW. This is my third IIW, and every time I meet more amazing people, learn a ton (both at the conceptual and technical levels), and leave with a renewed sense of energy and optimism that we can deliver the future we want. The people who come here are passionate about what they do, and they're always happy to explain their ideas and motivations to new people who want to get involved. At my first IIW, I didn't know anything about most of the concepts that are now at the center of my work at Plaxo on opening up the social web. I owe a debt of gratitude to everyone at IIW that took the time to help me understand, and I'm pleased to now be in a position where I can do some of that teaching as well.
At the next IIW (December 3-5), we're sure to talk about OpenID, oAuth, identity consolidation, friends-list portability, and more. Plaxo will of course be there (and we're pleased to help sponsor this time as well). The spirit you'll feel at IIW is that we're all in this together, and together we can make great things happen. I'll see you there.
--Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect
Congratulations to Google for leading the way toward an open social web -- and away from the Balkanization of many different little social web operating systems!
Also, congratulations to Joseph and Cam of Plaxo for being the very first to implement support for the new OpenSocial APIs in a live social network! And thanks to the RockYou team for all the help in making this stuff ready to go live before anyone else.
I just added the first OpenSocial app to my Dynamic Profile in Pulse. But you don't need to join Plaxo to see it. Why? Because Pulse is a truly open social network. The users own their own personal info and content, control who can see it, and have the freedom to take it with them wherever they want. So here's my personal lifestreaming widget:
The emoticon post came from a RockYou app written to the new OpenSocial API. I added the app to my professional profile in Pulse. Then I changed my status to "happy" and the new emoticon showed up on my profile -- and in my Pulse stream for all my business network connections to see. And, that ended up in my lifestream, which you see above in the widget.
This is an historic moment. Let the open social web innovation begin!
John McCrea
VP of Marketing
Update:
We have temporarily taken down this app, due to some bugs discovered today. We apologize for the inconvenience. We are at the early phase of this, so expect some ups and downs...Your patience appreciated.
I just got back from Google's Campfire One event, where they officially launched the OpenSocial project. As long-time advocates of the Open Social Web, we're thrilled that Google is leading this initiative, and even more thrilled that it's been received so positively! This is a huge deal, and it's perfectly aligned with our vision of empowering users to regain control of their social data across all the tools they use.
To keep the momentum going, we've been working hard to implement the OpenSocial APIs in Plaxo Pulse, and in fact we've just released it into production, making it the first live OpenSocial implementation in the wild. So if you'd like to play around with open social gadgets or develop one yourself, there's no need to wait any longer!
Now, if you've looked closely at the details of OpenSocial, you know it's still a work in progress. The APIs are only at version 0.5 and they're still changing almost daily. So expect a bit of a bumpy road for the next few weeks, and be aware that things may break along the way. But we'll do our best to keep things running smoothly and keep up with the changes as the specs continue to develop. [One quick note: for now we're only allowing specific apps from known developers that we've white-listed to run in Pulse. Email us at OpenSocial@plaxo.com if you want to get your app white-listed, and as the APIs and security models get more fleshed out, we'll ease off these temporary restrictions.]
We're releasing support for OpenSocial now because we want to make sure that everyone who's getting excited about it has a place they can channel their energy and get things running sooner. To that end, we've done our best to comprehensively support the existing OpenSocial APIs and integrate them richly within the Pulse experience. Specifically:
- users can add now add gadgets to their Pulse profiles (click on My Profile at the top of Pulse and then Applications on the left side)
- each gadget also has a full canvas page inside Pulse
- we support complete profile and contact info for the profile and friends-list APIs
- we support storing gadget prefs via the people data APIs
- gadgets can create activity streams and publish activity data, which will show up in the normal Pulse stream (alongside the existing feeds in pulse) with rich rendering support
- each activity can be commented on like normal feed items in Pulse
In addition, we've built OpenSocial gadget support into our new Dynamic Profiles feature, which means just as you can now show a separate profile (photo, bio, contact info, interests, etc.) to your business contacts and your friends, you can also add gadgets separately to your professional and personal profiles, and also control which sets of contacts see the activity streams from those gadgets. So if you just want to emote with your friends and not your business colleagues, now you can!
In case you can't tell, we're really excited to see the social web continuing to open up, and you can bet that we'll continue to push for even greater control, portability, and integration across all the sites and services you use. This is a major step forward, and there is plenty more to look forward to soon!
PS: To celebrate the launch of OpenSocial in Plaxo Pulse and to demo it to anyone that's interested, we're having an OpenSocial "Open Social" at Plaxo on Friday afternoon at 4pm in our office, and everyone's invited. Get all the details on upcoming (and don't forget to add the upcoming feed to your pulse stream so your friends can see you're coming! ;)).
--Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect