Back in November, shortly after the announcement of OpenSocial, I wrote a post about how making Pulse an open social network (rather than a “walled garden”) was good for our business. I included a chart that became the talk of the industry (coverage included TechCrunch, CNET, Valleywag, and even the New York Times). At SXSW, I became aware of just how many people had taken notice of the chart, when conversation after conversation down there eventually turned to: “Hey, about that open social growth chart…what’s the real story? What’s been happening since?”

So, I thought it was time for an update. The original chart showed a dramatic change in the rate at which the Pulse social graph was wiring itself up -– a "Great Inflection" point exactly coincident with the announcement of Google’s OpenSocial initiative on October 30, 2007. The biggest question raised by many at the time was, “Is that a sustainable change of slope or just a temporary PR-driven surge?” That question is even more relevant today, as we now know the OpenSocial story has taken a few months of development to solidify, and that we are just now starting to see full rollout on sites like MySpace. (We’re planning our own rollout in Q2.)

Well, I am pleased to announce that the trend that got kick-started with a PR surge did, indeed, end up sustaining. People liked what they saw when they came to Pulse, and the pace of establishing family, friend, and business connections has held remarkably steady. Here’s the latest Pulse social graph “hockeystick” chart, showing a continued meteoric rise from just 1 million connections in early November to over 7 million connections as of last week!

And, to be clear, these 7 million-plus connections are a new breed, an alternative to the model that forces all relationships to be described as “friends”. Every single connection in Pulse has a category, such as family, friend, or business. It’s what we think of as a “true social graph,” built up from the real who-you-know foundation of users’ unified address books. So, here’s a first peek at what happens when you give users a permission model for selectively sharing content, based on category of relationship:

When you give users choice in this area, the social graph that emerges begins to look like the real world. That is the real world of our demographic, which is the post-college crowd, centered on the 25 to 55 year olds. For that crowd, the largest slice of the pie derives from interactions out in the world: the set of people they currently work with, or worked with in the past, accounting for 75% of all connections. It is also interesting to note that when people have choices other than "friend," the word friend gets back its meaning; here we see just 20% of connections being labeled as real friends. And the group that for many is the most important, is by definition, the smallest – your family, representing here just 3% of the total connections.

We really believe that we are on the cusp of the next major phase of the Internet, a phase we call the “Social Web.” We are thrilled to see the major players actively working together on issues of data portability, implementing support for OpenID (Yahoo!) and microformats, coming together on application portability via OpenSocial, and creating innovative building blocks, like Google’s Social Graph API. We have been encouraged by the groundswell of support for the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web and for the concepts of data portability, in general.

For example, ReadWriteWeb, an influential blog, recently wrote:

“Securely moving your data around the web has increasingly become an important concept on the web. Arguably, it was the most discussed meme at this year's SXSW. While not an application, you could say it has been 'this year's Twitter'."

And here's a relevant video clip, featuring Joseph Smarr on the Portable Social Networks panel at SXSW, addressing the notion that open grows the pie; that this is not a zero-sum game:

Also, if you haven’t see Forrester analyst Charlene Li’s presentation at the recent Graphing Social Patterns conference, I highly recommend taking at look. The slides she used are here. Her thesis is that “social” will become such a natural part of the open Web, that social networking will become “like air.”

In other words, “open” is not just good for business – it is the natural way of the Web. And it's proving to be the case that the "air" Charlene talks about is wind in our sails.

John McCrea
vp of marketing

For users and developers that care about opening up the social web, one of the key building blocks for establishing a durable and portable online identity is OpenID. Recently the excitement and adoption of OpenID has skyrocketed, with Yahoo! providing OpenIDs for their entire userbase, Google's Blogger both providing and consuming OpenIDs, and several large organizations joining the OpenID foundation. Coupled with the security and usability enhancements added to the OpenID 2.0 spec late last year, it seems that OpenID is really going mainstream.

With the great progress made on the technical (privacy and security) aspects of OpenID and the increased adoption by mass-consumer companies, the user experience of OpenID is increasingly a topic of focus. There's a user-education hurdle to get used to the idea of logging into a site using an account you already have elsewhere, and the experience of bouncing between sites and attaching an OpenID can be jarring. An exciting aspect of Yahoo's approach to OpenID was trying to push the technology itself "under the hood" so users just see a friendly "Sign in with your Yahoo! ID" button and are taken to a familiar Yahoo login page. Now a new startup called clickpass, which is launching today, is taking things even further with their magic one-click signin button that removes the back-and-forth dance entirely, and integrates with a number of popular OpenID providers and consumers--now including Plaxo.

When you go to sign into Plaxo, you'll now see the distinctive orange clickpass button under the "Other ways to sign in" section (alongside our other OpenID integration points). The first time you click it, it will take you to a setup screen on clickpass's site that asks you to log into Plaxo if you already have a Plaxo account, or if you're new to Plaxo, you can sign up for a Plaxo account using your clickpass OpenID (no need to create a separate Plaxo password). Thereafter, when you come to Plaxo and click on the clickpass button, you're immediately signed into Plaxo. That's it, just one click.

It's now definitely the quickest and easiest way to sign into Plaxo, especially when you're on a different computer that doesn't remember your saved passwords. And what's cool is that you can hook up clickpass to a bunch of the sites you use, so you just log into clickpass and get one-click access to all the sites you've attached. And that first-time merge/signup page you get when using a new site is always the same, since it's hosted by clickpass. So the idea is that users should quickly learn how to sign into any site that supports clickpass, since the button is recognizable, the user flow is always the same, and the whole process is designed by a company that's primary focus is OpenID usability. Hopefully this will also encourage more sites to start consuming OpenIDs, since now there's a stronger case to be made that it's something mainstream users can understand and benefit from. There's still more work to be done on OpenID technology and usability of course, but this is a major step forward.