Plaxo and Yahoo! have long been working together to improve the interoperability of our services, making the process more seamless, powerful, and user-friendly. And we've always done it in ways that are fundamentally open, so others can learn from our experiences and get the same benefits elsewhere. Yahoo! and Plaxo were the first widely available showcase of OpenID 2.0 in action, we were the first large user of their new Address Book API, and we were the first to experiment with them adding profile portability on top of their OpenID flow. And today we're taking another giant step forward!

Starting today, we're beginning the roll out of a new experiment with Yahoo! for "hybrid OpenID+OAuth signup" to Plaxo. This approach is both more powerful, and more user-friendly than anything we've done so far together. It's more powerful because a Yahoo! user can not only sign up for Plaxo using their existing Yahoo! account (no new Plaxo-specific password or lengthy signup flow required), in the same act they can now share access to their profile, contacts, and updates stream, allowing persistent and 2-way flows of their important social data. This means they can quickly become a power-user of Plaxo, and the bridge they've built will allow future updates on either Yahoo! or Plaxo to flow in both directions--as always, in accordance with the user's wishes. And it's more user-friendly because Yahoo! has incorporated the latest "Open Stack user experience" research into their design--using a friendly, light-weight popup that clearly shows the user what they're being asked to share.

As usual, we'll start presenting this new flow to a small sample of new Yahoo! users who come to join Plaxo, and we'll report on the results as soon as they become clear. Our "hybrid signup" experiments with Google earlier this year produced the best results the industry had seen thus far, so of course we're very excited to see what we can do with Yahoo! This is further validation that open standards can give mainstream users greater control over their information and a greater ability to make the tools they use work well together. In fact, the vast majority of the code we built for use with Google was reusable without modification for Yahoo! And even though Yahoo! does not yet support Portable Contacts--the emerging standard for exchanging address book, friends list, and profile data--it was easy to transform the output of their API into this standard format, so it would "just work" with the infrastructure we already had.

Read the full story from Allen Tom at Yahoo! Developer Network Blog.

Here's what this new flow looks like to a Yahoo! user that was just invited to join Plaxo:

Selected Yahoo! users will see a custom invite landing page featuring express sign-up.

They can then sign in via a friendly popup (Plaxo never sees their password).

They can authenticate and share their profile and social data in a single click.

Plaxo can then help the user get connected without any additional friction.

Finally, they're shown how to sign in next time using their Yahoo! account.

Sharing news stories with your Plaxo network just got a lot easier with the rollout today of a new feed from the New York Times. If you’re a registered user of TimesPeople, it will only take you a second to hook it up (and if you’re not, it’s free and also just takes a second).

From then on, sharing a story you like couldn’t be easier. Whenever you read a New York Times piece that your want to share, just hit the “RECOMMEND” button next to the article. We’ll then deliver a link to the story, along with a headline, copy snippet, and thumbnail image to your profile and to the streams of all the people you want us to share it with. (Like with all feeds, there may be a slight delay before your story shows up.)

That’s right. No need to log in with your Plaxo credentials or search for a Plaxo logo on a page of sharing options. Just keep using TimesPeople like normal, and your recommended stories will also flow to your Plaxo connections.

This is a great example of Activity Streams going mainstream, connecting users of a professional-oriented social network with one of the most venerable news properties in the world. And best of all, it was built on top of open APIs—anyone could use the TimesPeople APIs and RSS feeds to build a similar integration, and nothing stops users from sharing their recommended stories into multiple sites at once, since the syndication is all done behind the scenes.

So give it a try, and let us know what you think. Browsing NYTimes.com has long been a part of my morning routine, and I often find stories I want to share with my friends or colleagues. Now I don’t have to think about which services to share on, whether I happen to be logged in, and where that service-specific sharing button has gone, I just click “Recommend” and let the Social Web do the rest!

Update: The New York Times covers our integration (on their Open blog)!

As an industry, we are collectively transitioning from the walled garden phase of social networking to an era characterized by openness and interoperability between social websites. In recent months, we’ve shown how much better things can be when websites work well together, while keeping the user in control. Now, we’re laying the foundation to enable even more interoperability later this year, this time between Plaxo and some of the other Websites within the Comcast Interactive Media (CIM) family.

Just as today we allow folks to sign up and sign in to Plaxo using identities from external websites, later this year we will allow you to sign up or sign in to Plaxo with an identity from other specified Comcast Websites. To do that, we are taking steps now to create a unified Terms of Service and Privacy Policy for the participating CIM Websites, including Plaxo, to provide consistent protection and to minimize complexity and confusion for our users.

The new Terms of Service and Privacy Policy will go into effect on October 6th, 2009. Those familiar with the details of our current terms and policies will find the new ones share many of the same core privacy principles and spirit of user control. We remain strongly committed to the notion that your data and content are yours (not ours). For more info, check out this posting from Comcast’s Chief Blogger, Scott McNulty.

Current Privacy Policy and ToS
Updated Privacy Policy and ToS

John McCrea
VP of Marketing