The team was busy this week! With today’s release, you can now upload photos directly, create a poll, write a review, and more! Of course, you control who sees what, whether it’s your family, your friends, your business network, or a group you’re a member of.

Upload Photos: Many of you liked seeing photos in Pulse but were confused about how to share them yourself, especially those of you who weren’t yet using sites like Flickr, Picasa, or the other great photo sharing services Pulse works with. Others wanted more granular control, like the ability to privately share one or more images just to a group. (And the thought of having to publicly share them first on another site didn’t make sense.) So, now you’ve got it – a simple way to upload and share photos, with all the control you’ve come to expect from Pulse.

Create a Poll: Looking for an easy way to harvest the wisdom of your network, or to help come up with a group decision? Try the poll feature. Pick a question, write up the possible answers, and choose whom to share it with. Should be a big hit with Pulse Groups.

Write a Review: Have an opinion to share? Write a quick review, pick the number of stars, and choose whom to share it with. Done!

Get notified on comments: Wouldn’t you like to know when other people comment on things you’ve commented on? Now you have the choice of getting notified by email when they do!

Hope you enjoy the new features.

The Pulse Team

Wouldn’t it be great to see at a glance the latest happenings in a person’s life right as you were about to send them an email? That’s the promise of the historic integration between Outlook and Plaxo Pulse.

Why “historic”? Because we are in the very early days of what I call the “Social Web,” an era in which the open web is fundamentally transformed by capabilities initially developed inside popular (but closed) social networks. The tidal wave of apps developed for the Facebook platform point to the hidden value that can be unlocked when applications are socially-enabled. But what if, instead of widgetizing apps to connect them with the “social graph”, you turned the idea around, and brought “social” to applications? That’s the concept behind the latest release of the Plaxo Toolbar for Microsoft Outlook...

We’ve integrated Pulse into the email system that most of us use at work. What does that mean? Now, you can see recent activity on a person’s Pulse stream in the Plaxo “Click to Connect” box and in Outlook’s “Contacts Detail” view.

This mashup makes it really easy to:

- See what the person is sharing on a large and growing list of sites, including blogs, Digg, Twitter, del.icio.us, Flickr, Yelp, and dozens of others
- Click over to see a person’s full profile and content stream on Pulse
- Keep growing your network based on who you’re communicating with via Outlook

That’s all in addition to the other things you can do with Click-to-Connect (as a result of previous mashups we did between Outlook, Plaxo, and the web), such as:

- “Google” the person with a single click
- Get a map or directions
- Initiate a VOIP call on a regular phone with a single click

If you’re already using Pulse, download the new toolbar for Outlook here. If you're not yet a member, get your account set up first.

John McCrea
VP of Marketing

At this week's Internet Identity Workshop, all the pieces finally came together. We now have the tools we need as a community to really make friends-list portability work--a way to give users back the control and power they deserve to take their local piece of the social graph with them wherever they go. And most importantly, a way to do this all securely, with respect and control for privacy and also the ability to find people that want to be found. There's no more need to wait. Game on.

The three missing pieces that came together at IIW were OpenID (version 2.0 is now final), OAuth (version 1.0 is now final), and clarity on the roles and responsibilities of users, social networks, and social applications in an open social web. IIW brings together an incredible community of people, and it's a major accomplishment for the web that all these technologies are now ready for prime-time.

I hosted a session at IIW in which I sketched a vision for how these pieces could come together to enable practical friends-list portability, and everyone was enthusiastic and supportive. And this included people from Google, Yahoo, AOL, JanRain, claimID, and members of the grass-roots community. In fact, I couldn't get anyone to pick a fight with me over any of technical or privacy details, and this is a group that prides itself on picking fights over technical and privacy details! So I think we're on to something big.

Here are the slides from my session (PPT, 408K), as well as detailed session notes from Chris Messina. If anyone has any further or feedback, please leave a comment here. Several people have also asked how they can help move this project forward more quickly. I think the next step is basically to do some strawman implementations of the various specs and glue code, and then to try and get it built into social networks and applications that "get it". Let me know if you'd like to get involved in this community effort to open up the social web (this complements ongoing work from fellow Open Social Web trailblazers like Brad Fitzpatrick, David Recordon, Tantek Çelik, and others).

And as far as Plaxo goes, the fact that these technologies now have final specs and the IIW community has blessed the vision for friends-list portability, you can expect us to step on the gas here in a big way. This is what Plaxo does best: we help you get your data out of sites and services that don't otherwise make it easy, and we make it work for you everywhere you go. There are a lot of sites that know who-you-know and a lot of social applications where you want to find people you already know. These open standards provide the foundation for solving this current inefficiency, and Plaxo is going to help put the solution in the hands of millions of users, sooner not later. This will be a major focus for us in 2008, and you should expect to see a lot more happening here very soon. It's going to be a good year for the Social Web!

--Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect