Plaxo is now fully integrated with FriendConnect--Google's widget-based tool for socially enabling any web site. This means on any site running FriendConnect, you can now securely connect your Plaxo account, see which of your contacts are also on that site, and invite any of your contacts to join that site. And, perhaps coolest of all, you can choose to have any activities you share on that site flow back into Pulse, so your Plaxo connections can keep in touch with you across the web and discover new sites you've found.

This is a truly useful and exciting integration--it's the closest we've come yet to a seamless social web ecosystem, in which users can take their identity and relationships with them across the web, find the people they know at a new site, and share activity back with their existing contacts, creating a virtuous cycle of more social discovery and sharing. This is how the social web should work--rather than having to start from scratch every time you try a new social site (which is still the norm for most sites today), each new experience you have should enrich the others.

This only works when services give their users control over their data and provide them with secure access using open standards. And that's exactly what Plaxo is doing with FriendConnect. When you connect your Plaxo account, we're using OAuth so you don't have to give out your Plaxo password, and you can always choose to revoke access later. And when you share activity from FriendConnect back into Pulse, we're using the OpenSocial 0.8 RESTful Activites API. The only custom integration right now is with our address book API, and we're already working with the community to develop an open standard for that piece of the puzzle too. We firmly believe that acting as an Identity Provider, Social Graph Provider, and Content Aggregator--that is, letting our users take their data and relationships with them across the web and share data back from anywhere--is good for users, good for Plaxo, and good for the Web. And we're just getting started--stay tuned for additional enhancements, including more fine-grained control over which of your family, friends, and business network you want to connect with on other sites, and who you want to see your shared activity from FriendConnect sites!

Here are some screen shots of Plaxo's integration with Google FriendConnect--or you can experience it for yourself on any FriendConnect-powered site.

---

---

---

---

---

Today marks a tremendously important milestone for believers of an Open Web. Yahoo! has announced it will provide OpenIDs for its nearly 250 Million users, meaning they will all be able to carry their digital identity with them in a secure way and use it to interact richly and securely with sites across the web. In parallel, Plaxo has also just released full support for consuming OpenID 2.0, which means among other things that all those Yahoo! users will be able to join Plaxo and use it to synchronize their data without having to create and manage yet-another-login-and-password. And of course so will the users of any other site that supports OpenID. That’s the great thing about open standards—the more people use them, the better they get.

Having a company as big and important as Yahoo! embrace a grass-roots, open-web standard like OpenID is a major accomplishment and validation. OpenID is now officially a mainstream technology, and the proof is that millions of users will now be able to take advantage of it, without ever knowing what OpenID is, how it works, or that they’re even using it. That’s because OpenID 2.0 (which was finalized late last year) includes a number of security and usability enhancements that will make it “just work” for mainstream users. In addition to the current “sign in with your OpenID” functionality on Plaxo, you will soon see a simple button that says “Sign in with your Yahoo! ID”. When you click this button, you’ll be taken to Yahoo!, where you sign in as you normally do, and you’ll be asked if you trust Plaxo to know who you are. Once you consent, you’ll be taken back to Plaxo, and presto! We create an account for you that’s tied to your Yahoo! account via OpenID. When you want to log into Plaxo, you log in via Yahoo, and Plaxo knows who you are and that you’re logged in, thanks to some cryptographic magic on the backend that you never have to worry about. All you know is “I use Yahoo, and now I can use it with Plaxo too.” That’s what it feels like when open social web technology really works.

And that’s just the start. The reason people are excited about OpenID—and the reason Yahoo! has chosen to embrace it—goes far beyond the convenience of single sign-on. The real power of OpenID is that it’s a key building block for giving users a durable and meaningful digital identity that they can use across the entire web. In an OpenID world, the services you use will really know who you are (because you can prove it with OpenID), and they’ll be able to talk to each other in a rich and secure manner (because you are now the same person to both sites). So, you’ll be able to consolidate your online identity (to the extent you want to, of course) and present a unified view of who you really are. And your friends will do the same. So when we talk about an “open social web” where you can stay in touch with the people you care about even though you’re all using different tools and services, this is what we mean. And this is how it’s going to happen. And today it just got real. If you can’t tell, we’re pretty excited.

=joseph.smarr, chief platform architect

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

Hi, I'm Joseph Smarr. I've been at Plaxo since the very beginning, so as you can imagine I've worn a lot of hats over the years (including most recently the architect of Plaxo Online 3.0, which we just released). I want to tell you about my newest roll as Plaxo's Chief Platform Architect. I'm now focused on helping Plaxo wire up the social web, and we're doing it with open standards. Here's why:

Plaxo's core mission is to help you stay connected to the people you care about. Doing this properly means integrating with the applications and services that you and your contacts already use, since that's where daily digital interactions take place. When we started Plaxo in 2002, this basically meant plugging into Desktop PIMs like Outlook. But since then, we've seen a remarkable flourishing of socially-enabled web services: photo sharing, blogging, social networks, social news, social bookmarking, and the list goes on. These days, "staying connected" to your family, friends, and colleagues means more than having their up-to-date contact info. It also means staying current with the digital lives we're all increasingly living.

Plaxo's vision has always been to integrate with all the tools and services that benefit from knowing who you know. We've built quite a few plug-ins and sync points ourselves (Outlook, Mac, Thunderbird, AIM, Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, LinkedIn, etc.), and a number of partners and developers have built additional integration points using our APIs. Lots of sites also use our widget to let their users access their address books across the web. But there's always more to do and we certainly can't do it on our own.

We believe that people will continue to create and consume content across a wide variety of services, and that no one site will ever be the de facto destination for everyone in the world. Thus we see the task of keeping who you know and what they're doing in sync across different sites and tools as core to Plaxo's mission, and an important challenge that our experience makes us well-suited to meet.

We also believe the best way to help wire up the social web is to continue embracing open standards and providing users with transparent access to their data across all the sites and services they use. Plaxo 3.0's sync engine is built on top of SyncML, vCard, and iCal; Plaxo Pulse is powered by RSS; and this is just the beginning for us. We envision a world in which users can easily find out who they know on any service and stay on top of what they're sharing. This can only happen if sites are open and let their users stay in control.

I'm incredibly excited about Plaxo's opportunity to help contribute to the open social web! Doing it right is a full-time job, and in fact it's now my full-time job in my new role as Chief Platform Architect. It's always been a personal passion, and my new title and focus reflects the importance that Plaxo is placing on it. So expect to see more support for open standards, more and better APIs, more widgets, and more developer tools to help empower our comrades.

If you believe in the Open Social Web, please tell me how you think Plaxo can best help out. You can always get my latest contact info at joseph.myplaxo.com. Or come find me at MashupCamp, OSCON, or similar events in the future.

--Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect

Whoa, it had been a while since we checked the stats on our Address Book Access Widget, and that thing is really taking off! The graph shows the monthly usage of the widget across all web sites that host it, and as you can see we're now helping over 250 thousand users access their address book data on other web sites every month. And the graph is, as our marketing guy John likes to say, "up and to the right". :-)

There are dozens of web sites of all sizes using the widget these days, but the two that currently drive the most activity are YouTube and Gaia Online. YouTube was actually one of our earliest widget users; I still remember showing an alpha prototype to Chad back in December 05. Even though the UI was still a bit rough, he immediately grokked what we were doing and was excited to use it for his "up and coming video sharing web site". YouTube's success is an inspiration to us all, and we'd like to think that Plaxo contributed in some small way to their meteoric rise in popularity during this year.

Gaia Online is one of our newest widget users, but they are already sending the widget more traffic than any site except YouTube. If you haven't seen it, Gaia Online is a virtual world with Avatars and quests, as well as the world's largest bulletin board system. The service is so popular that its users regularly donate money to the site, even though most of them are under 18! The founders of Gaia came and visited Plaxo for lunch this fall. After showing us a demo of Gaia Online that blew us away, they said they were interested in using our widget so their members could invite their friends to join Gaia. I sent an e-mail later that afternoon with instructions for hooking up the widget, and they replied that it was already done and would launch the next day!

Behind the scenes, getting the widget to fill data from Plaxo's domain to the site hosting the widget button led us to develop a new cross-site mashup technique, which we affectionaly refer to as "The JavaScript Wormhole". The talks we gave about this work at OSCON (ppt) and MashupCamp (ppt, video) have generated a lot of discussion, and we're excited to participate as this new field continues to develop.

In the meantime, if your web site lets your users invite their friends, share content, or build a social network, please consider taking advantage of Plaxo's widget. Your users will thank you and, who knows, it might even turn your site into the next YouTube! ;)

--Joseph Smarr, Architect / maker of widgets

A bunch of us at Plaxo are spending the day (and night!) at Yahoo as part of their first open Hack Day. It's a brilliant idea and so far they're doing a great job of running it--from the logistics (plenty of parking, food/drinks, excellent wifi coverage, lots of help on hand) to the content (the talks have all been fun and interesting, and all their stars are out and about, including Jeremy Zawodny, Cal Henderson, Doug Crockford, Andy Baio, and more). They're also setting up an impressive outdoor stage for their "surprise really awesome band" tonight (no one would tell me who it is, sorry). And the event has already served as a good deadline for Yahoo to release a bunch of new developer features, like Flickr JSON output (yay, at last!) and bbauth for Yahoo! IDs (very interesting potential here).

We can't wait for the festivities and hackery to begin this evening, and we plan to stay the whole night (you can track the fun by watching the hackday06 tag on flickr). So if you see any people with Plaxo t-shirts, that's us, come say hi! And if any fellow hackers are looking to integrate their users' address book data in their projects, don't forget to check out Plaxo's widget and APIs.

--Joseph Smarr

The good folks at Mashup Camp have put videos online from all the talks at Mashup University. I gave a talk on behalf of Plaxo about how to use our widget and APIs to make a "smart address book mashup" on any web site. I had previously posted my slides, and now you can watch the entire talk (.mov, 77.5MB)!

What we said back then in June is even more true today--almost every web site these days is using address book info (sharing content, inviting friends, social networking, etc.) and for most of these sites, building a hotmail auto-import or Outlook plug-in is probably the last thing they want to do. This is exactly why mashups are such a good idea. For instance, at Plaxo we use Yahoo! Maps instead of trying to build our own mapping solution. Not only does it save us work, we'd never be able to do as good a job because it's not our core focus. Similarly, most web sites should consider using Plaxo's widget and APIs instead of trying to build yet-another-address-book.

--Joseph Smarr

Hi from Portland! I've been here all week at OSCON 2006, the annual O'Reilly Open Source Conference, as has fellow Plaxite Terry Chay. It's been a lively and action-packed event (read as: none of us are getting much sleep). I gave a talk about Cross-Site Ajax on Wednesday afternoon, and it generated quite a lively discussion afterwards, featuring some key people from Mozilla and Google (this is why it's so cool to talk at a place like OSCON!).

Here are the slides from my talk, which include (among other things), some helpful links for more info on cross-site browser issues and the proposals others have made for making things better. Kevin Yank blogged a detailed summary of my talk, which subsequently got picked up by Ajaxian and others. Since one of the main points in my talk was "we need to talk more publicly about these issues", I'm glad to see that my presentation has already sparked some fresh discussion!

Thanks to everyone that came to my talk or met me in the hallways or at dinner. I was impressed an inspired to see how intelligent, thoughtful, passionate, and real the people at OSCON were. I can't wait to return next year (this was my first OSCON). If you missed OSCON (or even if you didn't), check out the OSCON photos on flickr and extensive coverage in the blogosphere.

--Joseph Smarr

P.S. The lovely and talented Caitlin recorded my talk in HD video, so we'll post the edited video when it's ready.

P.P.S I started writing this post last Thursday afternoon, but I'm just finishing it now because Anil and Brad kept me up past my bedtime at the SixApart party (thanks, guys! ;)).

I had a great time this week at Mashup Camp, which started with a presentation I gave at Mashup University about using our widget and sync API to smarten up your web site's address book. Several people have asked me for a copy of my slides from that talk, so here they are! (PPT, 1.7MB; also available as PDF, but you won't see the cool animations, heh!) For more info, be sure to check out our Plaxo developer pages at www.plaxo.com/api. I also ran a Mashup Camp sesison on aggregating profile data from across the web.

In addition to helping get the word out about Plaxo's resources for mashup developers, I met a lot of people at Mashup Camp that are working on exciting projects, including Danny Thorpe and Trevin Chow from Windows Live, Scott Isaacs of DHTML/Atlas fame (who has taught me a ton about web development over the years, but I'd never met), Kaliya Hamlin and Johannes Ernst, who are doing great work on user-centric identity (a problem that will become increasingly important for Plaxo users as people store more and more of their information on different sites across the Internet and want to collect and sync it all), Joe "Duck" Hunkins, who blogged most of Mashup University and Mashup Camp, and many more.

It's really energizing to see so many smart and passionate people working towards a common goal of making it easier for people to quickly build rich web experiences that can be used by anybody. We're proud to be contributing our own little piece to this noble cause!

--Joseph Smarr

PS: Fore more coverage of Mashup Camp, check out the wiki pages for the Mashup Camp sessions, the flickr photos, blog posts, and the Mercury News article.

In our continuing quest to save the world from not-another-disconnected-address-book-itis, I'm presenting a talk at Mashup University this Tuesday, July 11th, at 11:30am at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I'll demonstrate how to use Plaxo's Address Book Access Widget and REST-ful Sync API to enable your site to give its users access to their existing address book (wherever it may be), as well as explain some of the technical challenges Plaxo dealt with while creating these mashups.

MashupU will be followed by Mashup Camp 2, which many of us at Plaxo will be attending, including Mark Jen and our founders Todd & Cam. Apparently MashupU has filled up its 150 available attendee slots and MashupCamp has closed registration at 400+ seats! So if you're coming to either of these, please stop by and say hi, and if you couldn't make it, don't worry, we'll post a wrap-up when it's all done.

Here's the description of the talk:

Nearly all new web applications have a strong social component: sharing content with your friends, growing by invitation, and building reputations and ratings. Unfortunately, this means that many services are asking their users to build and maintain yet-another-address-book on each site they visit. As a result, these address books are usually incomplete and quickly become out-of-date, which is bad for both the sites and their users. Plaxo has built a “smart address book” that automatically stays in sync with the address books members already use—including Outlook, Mac, Thunderbird, AIM, and Yahoo. A few lines of JavaScript is all it takes to create a Plaxo mashup that lets people import and select contacts to be added in to their address books at any web site or application. Sites wishing for an even more integrated experience can implement Plaxo’s full REST-based sync and access APIs. In this session, we’ll talk about how to take advantage of Plaxo’s widgets and APIs, and I’ll discuss some of the underlying technology that makes these mashups possible.

UPDATE: I've posted my slides from the talk.

Thanks to Bloglines search, I noticed today that an enterprising Plaxo member has created a Plaxo widget for Netvibes. If you haven't heard of Netvibes, it is a very spiffy AJAX start page where you can view info from different sites in one spot. Many of us at Plaxo use Netvibes daily, so we're happy to see Plaxo become one of the available modules. In fact, this was going to be my next haxo project, but I guess one of our members beat us to it :)

If you are a developer and are interested in building Plaxo widgets for other sites or your own pages, you should check out our developer's page. We have a number of open APIs to play with (and more to come later) as well as a quick-import widget that makes it incredibly easy to import contacts from Plaxo as well as other popular address books like Outlook, Yahoo!, Hotmail, and Gmail. You may also want to check out our Thunderbird Plug-in, which is open source, built on our open API, and serves as a good example of how to build on top of Plaxo.

We'll also be hosting a mashup class at Mashup U (more on this later) and we hope to see many of you there!

It's great to see the wide attention that Yahoo's latest Hack Day is receiving, not to mention the fact that Yahoo! has clearly drunk the Hackathon kool-aid. At Plaxo, we have regular all-day hackathons, which we call Haxo, and they always end up exceeding our expectations, both in terms of what our fellow Plaxites create and in terms of how much everyone enjoys it. At our most recent Haxo day, people produced (among other things) a JavaScript widget that lets you embed your (always up-to-date) contact info in your blog or web site and an auto-troubleshooter for Outlook that diagnoses many of the common configuration problems our users have (connectivity, SSL settings, installed service packs, etc.). We've found empirically that a full-day hackathon once every 4-6 weeks is about the right interval--any more frequent and people feel like "we just did that"; any less frequent and people really start craving a reprieve from their day-to-day responsibilities.

What excites us in particular about Yahoo's latest hack day is the focus on actually shipping working products--"from idea to prototype in a day" as Chad Dickerson says. While it's great to see all the internal demos of Haxo projects people have worked on, the hard question is always "how do we get this stuff into the hands of real users?" Some projects end up getting rolled into future versions of our officially shipping products, but others are better suited as "side attractions" for a smaller audience of interested users to play around with. With that in mind, we're working on creating a "Plaxo labs" site where we can release many of our Haxo projects outside of our normal release channels (i.e. quicker but rougher). The plan is to have them all hit our production databases (so you can try them out with your real Plaxo account and data), but hopefully to reduce the risk that comes with releasing software that hasn't gone through the usual rigor of design and testing by keeping the code largely separate. As soon as we have it up and running, we'll let you know.

One thing that will help us (and others) ship new Plaxo features more quickly and with less risk is to make greater use of our APIs. As we continue to enhance our APIs and expose more of our core functionality, it will be easier to build rich experiences that interact with your Plaxo data and clients, yet which live entirely outside our main codebase. That's also why we're trying to make it easier to do simple Plaxo mashups like our Address Book Access Widget or the contact-info-on-your-blog widget mentioned above. Yahoo's hack day tagline is "mashup or shutup", so they clearly feel the same. :)

Part of the task is getting the word out to developers that you have these components available to use. So look for us at a lot of community events like the recent Dojo Developer Day and the upcoming Mashup Camp 2 and OSCON, both of which we'll be presenting at. And please continue to tell us what you'd like us to build to better enable you to build on top of the Plaxo network!

--Joseph Smarr, Software engineer and Haxo enthusiast

Answer: HipCal (www.hipcal.com).

Plaxo announced today the acquisition of HipCal, LLC, based in Troy, NY. You can read the formal press release at: Plaxo's website. However, I wanted to give you an insider's view of why we joined forces with these young guns from upstate New York.

You'll have to read the entire article to find out what we both have in common with pimps. ;-)

Plaxo has a calendar?

You may not know this, but Plaxo has had an online calendar for some time. Yup, we really do. As a matter of fact, we were using AJAX techniques two years ago before it was called AJAX (RSI thanks to Terry Chay and Joseph Smarr).

But, to be really honest, we did not put the same amount of effort and resources on our calendar as we did on everything else. Our users have been asking us to do for calendars what we did for address books--not just make them available everywhere, but make them easy to coordinate with friends, colleagues, and customers. This has been bothering us for awhile and it's one of those things that we put into the "someday" category. Well, this is that day.

Exploding calendars

So, it all started while we were watching with amusement as startup after startup announced their jump into the "new, Web 2.0 calendar" space -- the list is long. But, one of them caught our eye, HipCal (and apparently the Web 2.0 Awards and SXSW festival's eye too). I should mention that a few of the others look quite impressive as well -- 30 boxes also appears to stand our from the crowd.

Note that a good friend of mine, Mark Fletcher (ONElist, eGroups, Plaxo, Bloglines), says "Whenever you have more than one funded company in the calendar space, you know you are in the bubble." :-)

Anyway, back to the story...

So, the first thing that we noticed was that www.hipcal.com was extremely fast and simple. The design had a natural ease about it that appealed to everyone here and it was extremely snappy. The second thing that we noticed was that the team was very engaged and dedicated to their users, even though they had classes to attend at school (RPI)!

Garret Heaton

So, on a whim, I sent Garret Heaton, [the guy who started it as part of school project], a simple email: "Hey, love your site. Interested in talking about working together?" Garret replied fairly quickly with enthusiasm and we got started.

A few days later, during a conference call with the HipCal guys (all five of them), we quickly got into a discussion about joining Plaxo. And, at some point during the conversation, I said: "Think about it this way. Would you rather be in Troy, New York, in three feet of snow, working out of your parents' garage OR would you rather be sitting in a nice house on the beach in sunny California with all the beer you can drink and parties every night." After about about 15 seconds of silence--in which I was thinking that I made a huge tactical mistake--the other end of the phone burst into laughter and the group screaming "we like the second option better!" :-)

So, we flew the guys out to California, but had some trouble with the car rental since most car agencies require the driver to be 25 or over. Once we cleared that up, we got down to business. By the end of the day, we all realized that this was meant to be (i.e. they are five amazing, talented, and nice guys) and left us with a great feeling.

That was easy, now for the hard part

We signed the deal a few weeks later and have been making plans for a new calendar ever since. The guys will be moving to California in June. [Note: I failed to mention that buying a home on the California coast would cost a small fortune. ;-] The guys will be looking for a house to rent in Mountain View/Palo Alto very soon -- let me know if you have any leads.

Stay tuned for the big changes coming from Plaxo's new calendar team.

btw: The original name of HipCal was MyPIMP.com. And, in case you didn't know, "PIM" is a common acronym for Personal Information Manager.

Garret Heaton, Tawheed Kader, Pete Curley, Glenn Dixon, and Chris Rivers

More photos of the HipCal guys

Here's a photo of Pete Curley. We haven't figured out what he does yet, but we know that it has somethng to do with refilling the kegs. Oh, and Pete designed the cute little hippo on the HipCal site.

Here's a photo of Chris ("Silent Chris") Rivers. He's generally ....., um, er, ..... silent. But, once you get a few margaritas into him, watch out because he turns into "Crazy Chris"! He is rumored to have a very large shoe collection.

Here's a photo of Glenn Dixon. When we first met, I thought that he was "Silent Chris" and kept wondering "he talks a lot, I wonder why they call him Silent Chris...?" Glenn just recently got out of prison, but don't let his tatoos and rough exterior fool you... he's a teddy bear on the inside.

Here's a photo of Tawheed ("Wheed") Kader. He's sorta like the George Harrison of the HipCal group. [Not really sure what I meant by that, but it sounded good when I wrote it.] We don't understand what his nickname means yet, but he sure seems excited about moving to California.

UPDATE: Looks like we've got some initial reactions coming in :)

• Om Malik
• Techcrunch
• Red Herring

I just got a note today that zvents had implemented our Address Book Access widget, so I navigated over there and indeed they have!

When you're on an event page, just look for the "Email this event to a friend" link. From there, you can launch our widget to quickly grab your friends' e-mail addresses and share the event page with them. A quick timesaver we hope :)

We've seen some pretty good response towards our widget; more and more people are signing up to use it everyday. Hey, why build Yahoo, Hotmail, GMail, and Outlook import when Plaxo's already done it for you? If you're interested in the widget, or have questions about it, feel free to e-mail me.

-- Mark Jen, Product Manager

Update: Looks like they've mentioned it on their blog as well :)

A few months ago, we launched the Plaxo Partner program and our Open API. It's been a great success so far, with over 10 partners already signed up to Plaxo-enable their applications.

When it comes to address books, many companies first take the "build it, and they will come" approach, investing heavily in developing an address book database infrastructure that they then hope their users will populate. Lots and lots of evidence shows that this doesn't work: people don't add entries fast enough to cope with the ever changing dynamics of their network; and import tools are not used because as soon as you import data from another address book, it's out of date: people move, change jobs, get new email addresses and mobile phone numbers.

Plaxo's goal is to enable partners to create complete and accurate address book as well as new sources of revenue, by focusing first on getting complete and accurate data into the address book, and then on keeping it that way. One way we do this is through the Plaxo API and its accompanying tools.

The Plaxo API is accompanied by a set of tools for importing data from most sources of address book information (Outlook, Outlook Express, Yahoo!, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, etc.). The two together help you create a complete address book on your site that's connected via Plaxo to all the other places your users store data, and to all the other people your users know. It can help grow your business and help you offer new services that use the data.

If you have a site or a service you think needs a connected address book, we'd like to talk with you.

It's only been a few weeks since we released our Address Book Access web widget, but already a number of prominent sites have started using it, including YouTube, Zazzle, and others. If you haven't seen it yet, this widget lets any site easily auto-import a user's existing address book, including from Hotmail, Yahoo!, AOL, Gmail, Outlook, and Plaxo. Potential uses include letting your users send links or invitations to their friends (without having to remember and type in all their email addresses), seeing who you know that's already using a given service (e.g. finding friends on Flickr or Netflix), hopefully lots of uses we haven't anticipated!

In talking with current and potential partners, the one thing everyone tells us is "we want our users to have access to their current address book, but we really don't want to build--yet alone maintain--import code for all these different sites". We recently experienced a good example of why people feel this way: a couple of weeks ago, Gmail changed the charset encoding they used when exporting contacts, which broke the existing import code. Luckily, our monitoring tools picked this up right away, and once we figured out what had changed we were able to quickly build and release a fixed version. We have to do this kind of thing for a living anyway, but you certainly shouldn't have to go through that yourself! That's the idea behind the widget. :)

If you've added the widget to your site (or if you've used our sync API), please drop us a line. We're building a gallery of Plaxo-enabled sites and services, and we'd love to show off what you've done.

--Joseph Smarr, Lead Developer, Address Book Access Widget

Today we released a new beta of Plaxo for the Mac ("Maxo", as we affectionately call it here). Woohoo! And, of course we're all very excited about releasing a new product and finishing something that we've been working on for three friggin' years. There's a deeper meaning to this release, but I will get to that later...

Maxo team: Dru Nelson, Drew Colace, Jie Chen, Wendy Johnson (w/ Rosco), Mark Jen, Christian Bohland

Why did it take so damn long?

Plaxo has been around for four years (yikes!), and at our core, we've always felt that rather than inventing yet-another-address-book (or calendar), we wanted to bring Plaxo features to your existing address book. So, as a small startup in 2002, it made sense to start with Outlook and Outlook Express, since it clearly had the largest user base. And, like many young startups in their honeymoon phase, we had grand plans to quickly integrate with lots of other platforms, such as Mac, Act!, Lotus, Y!, Hotmail, and so on. This same question—"when do we do the Mac port?"—has happened at practically every job I've had (and in most cases, it never happened).

Well, as you can imagine, 2002 faded into 2003, and 2003 faded into 2004, and so on, and we still were putting huge effort into Outlook and Outlook Express. To be really honest, we didn't realize what we had bitten off when we started down the Outlook path—the stuff we've done to make Outlook and Outlook Express support Plaxo is a combination of creative engineering and voodoo incantations—but the good news is that we've finally figured it out and now have time to integrate with other platforms (no more dead chickens!).

[btw: Believe it or not, we started our very first Mac project back in 2002. We asked a few of our Mac friends to work in parallel with our Windows team and to try to stay up-to-date (source-wise). Unfortunately, this was a classic case of starting too early. The architecture was changing so rapidly that the Mac team was constantly out of date and eventually fell too far behind. The good news is that we finally got our APIs down and now have a base to start lots of new integration projects from.]

So, about a year ago we met Drew Colace. He impressed us with his Mac dev knowledge and captivating personality, and after changing our minds another ten times, we hired Drew to get us back on the Mac train. Drew jumped in with both hands typing and launched our first beta of Mac Plaxo in November 2005. Today's release is a major revision and was motivated by a lot of great feedback that we received from the first beta (thanks to everyone that helped!).

Why not do the Mac?

There are many great reasons for a developer or product manager to choose not to do the Mac version. In our case, there are definitely larger online address book user bases out there (e.g. Yahoo! and Hotmail) and Mac OSX is a completely unfamiliar operating system and development environment (and therefore expensive, risky, and complicated). And, a new platform introduces all kinds of new quality assurance and customer support issues. The list goes on, so I'm sure you get the idea. Inevitably it comes down to "is it worth the effort?" This is a question that thousands of product managers and engineering teams ask themselves (and most say "no" for reasons similar to above).

Why do the Mac?

So, why did we do the Mac? In most cases, the answer is because someone inside the company is a Mac zealot and begs enough to eventually get a programmer to hack out a demo and if they are really, really lucky, it actually ships for a few weeks (but gets little support or nurturing). It's rarely done for the right reasons and thus eventually peters out. But in our case, no one was a Mac zealot—although, we now have several Mac lovers at Plaxo—and we had no programmers with Mac dev experience. So, two things influenced us: 1) a Mac version of Plaxo was clearly the most requested feature we received; 2) the Mac community is rabid about products and embrace new things (if done well) with passion and enthusiasm; and 3) we firmly believed that we are not an Outlook-only shop. So, we saw a great opportunity to grow a small segment of extremely active users and force us to develop APIs that encouraged integration with Plaxo across a broad set of platforms.

API is the key

So, the story-within-the-story is that Plaxo is developing a platform to enable widespread integration. And, we wanted to eat our own dog food before others used our API. So, Maxo was the perfect choice to test this out since it was so different from the development environments that we were used to. We figured that if the APIs worked for a Mac programmer, they will work for anyone. :-) And, the only reason that it took us so long to release Maxo was because it was the guinea pig for future API users. As you can guess, this slowed Drew and team down quite a bit, but they persevered and shipped Maxo.

UI Evolution

Integrating Plaxo into the Mac Address Book offered unique UI challenges to us since we were less familiar with the Mac user experience and we recognized the importance of a 100% Mac experience. Anything less and we expected to be ignored by the Mac community.

A few key things drove our user experience design: 1) 100% Mac, 2) integrate into the Mac Address Book, not compete with it, and 3) find the right visual balance between "fits in" and "stands out."

Our first revision looked like this. We created a separate Plaxo address book application that synced with the Mac Address Book. This immediately felt weird and forced the user to make a choice between the Mac Address Book and the Plaxo Address Book.

Screen shot of Maxo first alpha release

In our second revision (Beta 1), we tried to integrate the Plaxo features into the Mac Address Book. We added the Plaxo widget at the bottom of the contact entry, but found this to be problematic and often obscuring the contact details.

Screen shot of Maxo first beta release

And, our current Beta looks like this. We moved the Plaxo enhancements to the right side of the contact details and enabled users to expand and contract the panel. This appears to be the best choice, but we're still looking for feedback.

Screen shot of Maxo second beta release

You can download the latest version at: http://www.plaxo.com/downloads/mac/

See the press release at: http://www.plaxo.com/about/releases/release-20060314

 

--Rikk Carey, EVP Engineering & Operations

Be sure to check out our press release today regarding our Open Platform Program. More information is available at: http://www.plaxo.com/api.

Our Open Platform Program encompasses our open API as well as the Plaxo Address Book Widget.

The Plaxo API is currently available as a Representational State Transfer (REST) Web Service and allows developers to integrate Plaxo synchronization functionality directly into their own applications. For example, our recent Plaxo for Thunderbird client utilizes the Plaxo API. In the future, other representations or protocol bindings may also be defined.

The Plaxo Address Book Widget allows a web site developer to add address book functionaity to their site through some very simple scripting. Visitors to the site can (1) seamlessly import contacts from multiple address books, (2) select entries, and (3) enter selected data into web page forms. For the millions of existing Plaxo members, the Widget allows them to access their complete Plaxo address book directly from any website utilizing the Address Book Widget.

For users, imagine being able to go to your favorite online store, selecting a gift, and auto-filling in the shipping information directly from your Plaxo-enabled address book. For web site developers, imaging offering greater ease and convenience to your users, and knowing that the information they are providing is accurate and up-to-date.

We announced today that five partners have already signed up to Plaxo-enable their Web sites and applications using our SOAP API: ColSpace, Global Systems, Greenlight Wireless, ModoMail, and Trekmail. This means that our members can access their Plaxo address book, calendar, tasks, and notes from within these services. While we've focused so far on integrating with Outlook and Outlook Express, our goal is that your up-to-date Plaxo information should be available to you in all of your favorite apps. If you're interested in Plaxo-enabling your Web site or application, please contact us at partnerships@plaxo.com.

For those of you unfamiliar with web services, partners download our WSDL file which describes the services our API offers (e.g. fetching your address book, sending out an update request, adding a new calendar appointment). There are web service packs for most popular languages (e.g. Java, C++, PHP) that will translate the WSDL into local code, so when you Plaxo-enable your application, it looks like you're just calling your own subroutines to talk to Plaxo. Behind the scenes, those functions are generating XML which is passed up to our server. Our server looks up the data in the database and performs any necessary actions, then sends XML back as a response, which turns into the return values. Partners don't need to know any of those gory details though, they just call the functions and get the data.

For security, all API calls are made over SSL so the user's password and data are encrypted during transport. We authenticate both the partner and the Plaxo member, so no one can touch your account without your permission.

We look forward to a day when you only have to maintain a single address book and it follows you around everywhere you go. Our API is a step in that direction, and we're encouraged by the adoption we've had so far. Help us get the rest of the way there by Plaxo-enabling your own service or telling the company that provides it that you want access to your Plaxo data!

Thanks,
The Plaxo Team

Have you seen the Plaxo mention in the December issue of Release 1.0? Esther Dyson looks at the social networking space and Plaxo is featured. Dyson dives deep into Plaxo, what it is doing today and its plan for tomorrow.

Here's a peek at some of what Plaxo told Dyson:
"The company has plans to build a Web services API for developers to plug into its infrastructure and enable third-party software vendors and websites to add Plaxo functionality..."

If you want to read more of the article click here: http://www.edventure.com/release1/abstracts.cfm?Counter=7592224