Last month we added one of the key features that had been missing from our spin on social networking, the ability to search for people. We want to make Pulse a comfortable and enjoyable experience for mainstream users around the world. So, out of respect for user privacy, we decided to make the directory 100% opt in. The only profiles in our directory are from members who explicitly opted to be included in the directory.

Now that over a million of our members have opted-in, we’re now ready to open the doors on the directory. It’s available at www.plaxo.com/directory. Over time, the directory will keep getting better, as more of our 20 million (and rapidly growing) member base opts-in. We're initially launching in English, with more languages to come.

As the directory will be indexed by Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines, we chose to make your default public profile page fairly minimal. You can customize your public profile page to show any and all (or none) of your Plaxo profile. For example, you can choose whether to show your educational history, your professional history, or your interests. You can also create an easy-to-remember URL that you can print on your business card, like hongkwon.myplaxo.com (it's printed on mine). To get started, go to your public profile settings page.

Of course, if you change your mind and decide not to be listed, opting out is as simple as going to your settings and turning off People Search.

Hong Kwon
Product Manager

With the recent announcement that Plaxo has signed an agreement to be acquired by Comcast, I've been receiving a few emails from members asking, “What will happen to my data?” So I thought I’d address that with a quick blogpost.

The short answer is that the same privacy protections that you have now will remain in place after the acquisition closes. Plaxo will remain as an independent subsidiary of Comcast, with all of the current management team (I will continue to serve as Plaxo’s Chief Privacy Officer). The Plaxo privacy policy is a legally-binding document which limits how your data may be used; it is also legally binding upon anyone who acquires Plaxo. This policy will remain in force following the acquisition and any data you have provided Plaxo will continue to be covered.

The privacy policy explicitly states that following a business transition (e.g. an acquisition) your information will continue to only be used in the manner specified by the privacy policy in effect at the time when that data was collected. If Plaxo wants to use your data in a different manner we are required to notify you as to the change; you will have a choice as to whether your data may be used in this manner. You will continue to have the ability to control your communications preferences (i.e. you can opt-out of receiving any promotional offers) and you will retain the ownership of your data, as well as the ability to delete your data at any time.

Many of us take for granted the words written in the privacy policies of the websites we visit. But I do encourage you to read ours here so that you can see the choices and empowerment we provide our users. You can also read more about what this acquisition means to you, as written by an independent watchdog group, TRUSTe. For the past several years, both Plaxo and Comcast have voluntarily agreed to have TrustE review their privacy practices for compliance. TRUSTe also provides a free service to our users to mediate any disputes involving their privacy rights and data.

Although Plaxo will be a Comcast subsidiary, we will remain independent - having our own privacy policy, keeping the same management and employees, and continuing the evolution of the address book. The acquisition does not change the Plaxo you already know, except that we look forward to providing more services and features for our users. By becoming a part of Comcast, we believe that we can make our services significantly better for all of our users.

We hope that you will continue to enjoy the services you’re getting from Plaxo, and we intend to keep making them better. But if at any time you no longer wish to be a member of the Plaxo network, you can delete your account at any time – and delete the personal data you have entrusted to us.

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.

Redgee Capili
Sr. Director Client Services &
Chief Privacy Officer

Big doings at Plaxo today! We are really excited to announce some of the biggest news in the history of Plaxo: We have just signed an agreement** to be acquired by Comcast, the nation's leading provider of entertainment, information and communications products and services (and our largest customer and partner).

Joining forces with Comcast is a real win for our customers, our investors, and our employees. Comcast has an exciting vision to bring the social media experience to mainstream consumers. Together, we will be able to help users connect with all the people they care about, across all of the devices they use, with all the media they love to consume, create, and share. This is also great news for the Internet industry at large, where Plaxo has been – and will continue to be – a strong advocate for opening up the Social Web.

Plaxo will remain an independent operation in Silicon Valley, reporting into Comcast Interactive Media, which is a division of Comcast that develops and operates Internet businesses focused on entertainment, information and communication. All of our 50 employees will continue to innovate on and grow both our networked address book service and our next-generation social network, Pulse. And through additional integration projects with Comcast, we’ll be able to take these services to a lot more users and places than we could on our own. We are developing an exciting roadmap with Comcast that includes socially enabling the media experience in places such as Comcast’s high traffic portal (Comcast.net),CIM’s popular interactive entertainment properties (such as Fancast and Fandango), and the television

Plaxo and Comcast have been working together for the past year on a number of initiatives. Plaxo is providing the universal address book for Comcast’s SmartZone communications center (slated to launch later this year), and we are also now hosting all of the address book accounts for Comcast webmail users. Our partnership has already more than doubled the reach of the Plaxo network, bringing the total number of accounts to nearly 50 million.

Together, we intend to deliver on a vision of making “social media” a natural part of the lives of regular people, not just early-adopters. For example, you should be able to securely post family photos online in Pulse, and have them viewable by any of your family members, whether they are online, at work, on their mobile device, or in their living room watching TV. And you should be able to discover new shows to watch, based on what your friends and coworkers have recommended.

So, what about current Plaxo members? The services you know and enjoy from Plaxo will not only continue, but will continue to evolve and improve. In addition, both of our services benefit from “network effect,” which is to say that the more people who use them, the more useful they become.

Continued Protection of Your Privacy and Support for Interoperability
Plaxo has always been a strong advocate of giving users ownership and control of their data. We protect our users’ data with one of the strongest privacy policies, which will continue. We will continue to work toward greater interoperability and data portability, with the user at the center and in control. Comcast has a similarly strong privacy policy, and we are both committed to ensuring that the protections users have come to expect will continue.

In Conclusion
Finally, we’d like to extend an enormous thanks to the people who have helped Plaxo reach this point—our millions of loyal customers, our patient investors and advisors, and the extraordinarily talented group of employees who have worked so hard to bring us to this point.

So, whether you’ve been a part of the Plaxo network for a long time, joined recently for Pulse, or have just followed us from the sidelines, we appreciate your interest in the Plaxo story. We are excited to open a new chapter today.

Ben Golub, CEO
Cameron Ring, Founder and Chief Architect
Todd Masonis, Founder and Vice President of Products

** We are not releasing financial details of the transaction. The acquisition is subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals, and is expected to close in the near future.

We’re passionate advocates of opening up the Social Web, and have been working hard on a number of initiatives in support of that vision (including OpenID, microformats, OpenSocial, consolidated online identity, and the Social Graph API). Today, we are pleased to add another (really exciting one) to the list: Google’s just announced “Friend Connect.” And we’re announcing that Plaxo will become a “Social Graph Provider” in support of this bold initiative to “socially-enable any webpage.”

What is a Social Graph Provider, you may ask? It’s any social network that elects to let its users take their “friends list” with them to use all over the open Social Web. We assert that this is a critical missing piece at the center of a “services layer” for the emerging Social Web ecosystem:

The above chart shows all the parts, and how we see them fitting together. At the center is the user, with ownership and control of their data – and the freedom to take it with them, wherever they go. At the edge is a large and growing number of socially-enabled websites. In between, are a set of services that take friction out of the process for using yet-another social site:

• Identity Providers give users access to a new site without having to create a new username/password pair. (Example: Yahoo’s implementation of OpenID.)
• Social Graph Providers give users a way leverage their existing relationships, instead of manually re-creating them all over the place. (Announced examples: Plaxo Pulse, Orkut, MySpace and Facebook.)
• Content Aggregators give users a place to see what their friends are creating and sharing all over the Social Web. (Examples: Plaxo Pulse, FriendFeed, and a long and growing list, and recently, Facebook.)

As these elements evolve in the coming months, we expect to see lots of good things happening at socially-oriented sites of all sizes. But what if you could tap the power of this new service layer without having to directly interface with any of its elements? What if you could simply sprinkle in a few lines of javascript, and make any webpage social? That is awesome promise of Friend Connect.

A lot more to come
In line with this vision of a Social Web ecosystem, we’ve been working for a while toward becoming a Social Graph Provider. So, when Google approached us to collaborate on Friend Connect, we saw the perfect opportunity to turbocharge our effort. There’s still a bunch of work to be done, but at launch, the intent is to enable you to access your full address book or any subset of Pulse connections (family, friends, business network) on any Friend Connect page or site. Down the road, we intend to let you tell us which relationships are strong enough that you’d like to have them available to you elsewhere, without having to be asked to reconnect.

For now, we’re really excited to see how quickly all this is coming together. 2008 is really becoming “the year of data portability,” and the year in which we collectively evolve beyond the “walled garden” model of social networking.

John McCrea
VP of Marketing