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.

---

---

---

---

---

One of the best features of Plaxo Pulse (and other sites that do social content aggregation) is the ability to have discussions (via comments) about the items being shared. A link to an interesting article, recent photo, YouTube video, Yelp review, tweet, etc. is often the jumping-off point for a rich discussion amongst people who all know and care about each other. In such cases, the comment thread is often far more interesting than the original item that sparked it. Some of these discussions happen privately between mutually connected friends or family members; others are public discussions about public content, but filtered through the people you know, rather than what everyone on the net has to say (look at the comment stream for any YouTube video, and the signal-to-noise issue is obvious).

Most of the time, this system of comments inside aggregators works quite well. But one place where it's never felt quite right is when someone shares their public blog, which also has its own comment stream on the blog's website. In such cases, the conversation can too easily become "fractured", as some people read and post comments on the blog's web site, and others do the same inside an aggregator, but with a different set of comments. Whereas a separate comment thread can be an asset in the case of private or "noisy" content as mentioned above, many blog authors would prefer to maintain a single thread of comments, no matter where their post gets viewed. This issue has been brought up periodically since the early days of Pulse, and it recently saw a resurgence of fervent debate in the blogosphere.

Plaxo's mantra is always to "give our users control", so naturally we're in favor of letting blog authors share their feed inside Pulse and providing a way for comments generated inside Pulse to flow back to the original blog. The problem is, there's no standard way of programmatically interacting with the comment system on an arbitrary blog. So while it's never been our aim to "trap comments" inside Pulse, there hasn't been a good way to set them free. Until now.

Starting today, we've integrated Pulse with a cool startup called Disqus that makes a "smart comment system" plug-in that works with most popular blog software. If you install Disqus to run the comments on your blog, in addition to their standard improvements like threaded comments, rating comments, verifying commenters, integrated forums, and more, you can now also choose to have any blog comments posted inside Pulse also show up on your original blog. This is possible because Disqus provides a common platform with APIs that let blog authors tell Pulse where their blog comments live, and lets Plaxo automatically syndicate any comments posted inside Pulse. So if you write a blog, now you can have the best of both worlds--more people can find and comment on your blog posts using tools like Pulse, and yet you can maintain a single thread of comments for everyone.

Hooking up disqus comment syndication when sharing a blog inside Pulse

Comments posted inside Pulse will then also show up on the original blog post

If you haven't yet shared your blog inside Pulse, now is a great time to set it up. [If you're not already running Disqus on your blog, they have an easy wizard to help you set it up, and it works with most popular blog software, including MovableType, TypePad, Blogger, Tumblr, and self-hosted wordpress, though sadly not yet hosted wordpress blogs on wordpress.com, since they don't let you run JavaScript in plugins.] Then when you hook up your blog to Pulse, you just check "I use Disqus for my blog's comments" and fill in your disqus forum URL (e.g. for my blog http://josephsmarr.com, my associated disqus forum url is josephsmarr.disqus.com). [If you're already sharing your blog inside Pulse, you can click to edit your existing feed and then add your disqus forum url.] Now when anyone sees one of your blog posts inside Pulse and goes to comment, they'll be notified that any comments posted inside Pulse will also appear as a comment on your original blog post. And when they do leave a comment, it will show up on in your disqus-powered comment thread soon afterwards, and without you or them having to do anything. Disqus will notify you of a new comment just as if they'd commented directly on your blog, and similarly the commenter's name, email, and webpage will be automatically filled in along with the comment.

We're excited about this new ability to keep discussions shared across an open social web. It's one more step on the path away from walled gardens and toward a world in which users are empowered because their data is portable. If you're a blogger, give it a try and let us know what you think!

--Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect

PS: If you have any feedback on this integration--or anything else about Plaxo--let us know (using the disqus-powered comments on this blog post, of course--whether you're reading this on our website or from inside Pulse!).

UPDATE: Check out the post from our vp of marketing, John McCrea, on this topic.

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.

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

If you've followed our blog, you know that at Plaxo we love to periodically do all-day Hackathons, which we call Haxo days. By now we've created a ton of cool little features and products, but so far we have not done a good job of getting them into the hands of our users. It's often a lot of work to take a side project and fully integrate it with our existing code and UI, but many of the things we've built could be perfectly useful on their own. We just haven't had the right home for them. Until now.

Starting today, we've got a new Plaxo Labs site, where we'll be putting a bunch of projects we cooked up in our spare time that we want to share. Some are rougher than others, but they're all far enough along that we'd love you to play with them and let us know what you think.

To kick things off, we've released the following five projects to Plaxo Labs:

• A new-and-improved Plaxo WAP site for mobile phones (like our first WAP version, this project started as a passionate side project by one of our engineers and quickly turned into a full-featured product)


• A plaxo search page for quick lookup of all your Plaxo data, which can also be added as a search plugin in IE7 and Firefox


• Plaxanoid: the classic game with a Plaxo twist (this was one of our engineer's way of teaching himself JavaScript, and it definitely brought company productivity to a halt for at least a day as we all started playing it)


• A map view of your entire address book--it can take a while to load, but it's a really interesting new way to see all the people you know


• A downloadable troubleshooter for Outlook that can automatically diagnose many of the common connectivity problems our customer support team normally deals with

This is just the start--now that all our Haxo projects have an easy place to get released, expect to see a bunch more things on labs in the near future. For each project, we've set up a discussion group and email address for feedback--please let us know what you think and what you'd like to see!

--Joseph Smarr, Architect and Haxo enthusiast

Although we’re all really busy working on the new Plaxo 3.0 we still make sure to schedule time for our beloved Haxos. During this past Haxo, Garret fixed up a new mobile version of Plaxo he’d been working on and it’s now ready for users to try. It’s built as a WAP 2.0 app and was very quick to develop using our new Plaxo 3.0 APIs and PHP. In the current version you can access all your data (calendar, contacts, tasks, and notes), see the current weather, and search for contacts. You can even add tasks and notes (events & contacts coming soon!) so you can jot things down when away from your computer.

Since this isn’t an official product, you may find bugs or areas that need improvement. It’s even possible that it won’t work at all on your phone (especially if it’s an older model). Good or bad, please let us know how it works for you by posting in the new Plaxo Mobile Google Group or sending us an e-mail at labs-mobile@plaxo.com.

Happy WAPping!

-- Mark Jen
Product Line Manager

Hey there Plaxo users! We've been hinting for months now about an all-new and improved version of Plaxo Online (called "Plaxo 3.0"...very creative, huh?). And, we are almost ready to go prime-time, but first we need help testing it on our most daring, helpful, and dedicated users (before unleashing it on everyone else). So, if you are a passionate user of Plaxo and an "early adopter" of new technology, you can volunteer for the private beta. The first 1,000 people who send an empty e-mail to privatebeta@plaxo.com will be given instructions on how to get started in a couple of weeks. [Note: we will not read or reply to the emails sent to privatebeta@plaxo.com.] What’s included? A completely new version of Plaxo Online Localized for various languages Expanded list of "sync points" (including Google, Yahoo!, and Hotmail) An innovative new online calendar A few other surprises Hope to see you in the beta, -Rikk (and the Plaxo Team) P.S. In case you don't know, "Plaxo Online" is what you get when you log in to www.plaxo.com and use your Plaxo account (as opposed to accessing Plaxo via Outlook or Outlook Express).

Teamwork pays off! Join us in testing Plaxo 3.0!

Joining a web 2.0 start-up to lead its Globalization effort was an eye opener for me in many ways. It required a bit of work-style adjustment on my part: from a no-walls environment where we may be visited at any time by one of our mascot dogs, to doing some coding myself, to the sound of a foosball game, to a more informal development process than I was used to (oops, did I use the p word?), to a do-it-yourself, hands-on attitude on just about everything.

But nowhere was the difference more noticeable than in the budget. At a small company every single dollar counts, and I knew right away that I would have to adopt a leaner and meaner approach to managing the internationalization and localization of our next generation product. That's where Skype came in.

Skype had been part of my life for a while already. I use it to communicate with family and friends in the UK, Brazil, France and Japan. Now I've put it to use at Plaxo, eliminating one of the most obvious costs in globalization: communication with partners, localizers, testers and power users of our product who live half a world away.

I simply ask people if they Skype. If they don't, I suggest they install it and recommend an inexpensive headpiece set. That way I can talk with any of my international associates for as long as needed. We use it to discuss bugs, test a feature real-time in different locales to gauge its implications for non-US users, or make sure localization instructions are well understood.

SkypingAround has become such an integral part of my day that I can no longer justify using the phone -- not even with one of the VoIP plans -- for any business related long distance calls. If other globalization managers are not following this model they should. It's one more budget line item they can eliminate.

By the way, stay tuned for the all new localized Plaxo, coming to you soon!

-- Regina Bustamante
Director, Globalization

We’re guessing that most of you aren’t losing sleep at night wondering what Plaxo is doing for you. But wouldn’t it be nice to get a peek into the changes that are happening while you’re sleeping?

We just redesigned the quarterly My Plaxo summary so you can get an instant snapshot of all the activity that has taken place in your smart address book over the last 3 months.

Soon you should receive (if you haven’t already) a snazzy looking e-mail that gives you information about:

• Your contact info: You can see your latest contact info and when you last updated it and edit it.
• Upcoming birthdays: A list of upcoming birthdays for people in your address book and an easy way to send an eCard for delivery on the day of choice.
• New connections: People you recently added to your address book or who recently joined Plaxo.
• New info changes: See all the changes like new addresses, companies, job titles and phone numbers for the people in your address book.
• New places you can use your smart address book: New partner sites on the web where you can directly access your Plaxo smart address book to do things like send e-mails, gifts and forward movies to your contacts seamlessly.

Of course, if you ever want to opt-out of receiving these e-mails, it’s really easy. There’s a little link at the bottom that takes you to your communication preferences.

But hopefully, you’ll find the quarterly My Plaxo summary useful and interesting and that it will give you a little “ah-a” moment where you say to yourself, “So that’s what Plaxo’s been doing for me all this time!”

-- Dassi Shusterman, Sr. Product Manager

At my parent's home, you can always find a stack of calling cards next to the phone in the kitchen. It's the cheapest way for them to keep in touch with their family in Vietnam. But calling cards have always been such a hassle. Minutes run out, some cards don't work, and the rates really aren't all that cheap. My mom was paying about $0.27/minute to call her niece in Vietnam with a calling card. Over the weekend, though, my sister and I got my mom to try her first international call via Plaxo Click to Call. She converted solely on the cost. At $0.16/min., she talked to her niece for longer and with no interruptions from minutes running out on her calling card. And she did it all from the convenience of her landline phone.

You, dear reader, can also find the Plaxo Click to Call button in your address book. It's the easiest way to make inexpensive phone calls. By easy, I mean no headsets, no downloads, and no microphones. Just Plaxo, you, and your phone. And by inexpensive, I mean less than $0.0212/min to China, $0.0196/min to Germany, and only $.001/min in the US. You can check out the rest of the rates here. By partnering with Jajah, our members get the additional benefit of not having to remember or type in any phone numbers, and they always know the number they're calling is up-to-date with Plaxo's smart address book.

Here's how you can initiate a call:

Jajah in Outlook	Jajah in Plaxo Online

1. Go to your Plaxo Online address book or get the latest Plaxo plug-in for Outlook to make calls from your Outlook address book. (Plans are in the works to integrate with Outlook Express and our other clients too.)
2. Decide who you want to call. Click on the purple button. (See picture above).
3. Plaxo transfers the numbers to Jajah's website.
4. Hit the green "Place Call" button on Jajah's website.

THEN...


5. Your phone rings.


6. Your contact's phone rings.


7. And you can start chatting.

Mom doesn't always "get" what I do at Plaxo, but now she sort of gets it and she likes it. Now, when she can't get in touch with me on the weekends, she can call Vietnam :)

-- Janice (Hi, Mom!) Ta, Product Manager

I’m another recent Plaxo hire…I joined two weeks ago to lead Plaxo’s Globalization effort. It’s time for us to expand our international presence and show our international members that we really care about them.

It may seem weird to say we want to increase international presence when we already have members in over 83 countries and about 30% of our members come from outside of the US. The 12 countries with the largest Plaxo membership are:

1. United Kingdom
2. Australia
3. Canada
4. Brazil
5. South Africa
6. Netherlands
7. Germany
8. France
9. Mexico
10. New Zealand
11. Italy
12. India

Did you notice the same thing I did when I first saw it? Seven of these are either English speaking countries or countries where people speak English well and feel comfortable using it. We have nothing against our English speaking members; in fact, we love them. But one of our goals in 2006 is to enhance the user experience of our non-English speaking members and show the world what a smart address book can do.

Judging from visits to our site and search trends, folks around the world are taking notice. According to Google Analytics and Google Trends.

There is definitely a correspondence to our overall international membership numbers, and also a noticeable absence of Asian countries.

Back to Globalization; we are working to consider international users’ needs from design to development to localization to support. Yes, we are going to localize Plaxo! We'll start with a few languages, with many more to follow. Can’t talk about dates yet, after all I’ve just started!

I’ve made a career of Globalization and am really passionate about it. If you are an international Plaxo member and have comments or suggestions, I'd love to hear from you. Please post here or email me directly.

-- Regina Bustamante, Director of Globalization

The reaction to Plaxo’s acquisition of Hipcal across the blogosphere has, for the most part, been extremely positive. We’re glad to see this, since we think the HipCal calendar application (and team) are fantastic, and will bring great value to our users.
However, a few people have asked why this makes business sense, especially since Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! all have offerings in this space, and since there are a large number of standalone calendar offerings.

So, here are some quick answers to the following :

1. Why does this make sense for Plaxo Users?


2. Why does this make business sense for Plaxo?


3. How can you compete with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft in this area

1)Why does this make sense for Plaxo Users?
Plaxo provides users with a Smart Address Book that enables them to stay up-to-date, organized, and in-touch with the people that they care about.

To date, we’ve focused most of our efforts on the contact list, enabling:

1. Staying in touch with your data: Users keep a single set of contact information for friends, colleagues, and customers that can be used virtually anywhere, and that stays synchronized across multiple different platforms and accounts (e.g. Yahoo, Outlook, AIM, Mac, PC, mobile phones, and a number of online services)


2. Staying in touch with people: As friends who also use Plaxo move, change jobs, have birthdays, get new phone numbers, change e-mail addresses, etc.—we make sure that you know, and that your smart address book gets automatically, everywhere you use it.

That said, it has always been our conviction that address book and calendar should be intimately connected tools for staying organized and for managing relationships with the important people in ones life. So, we think it is natural—if not essential-- for us to offer calendar functionality – and have that calendar functionality deeply intertwined with the address book. In fact, for over a year, we’ve had a calendar that does the “Staying in touch with your Data” piece of the equation. (For example, you can edit and maintain your calendar at work in Outlook, and at home from your mobile, various online services, etc.) But…we haven’t enabled the “Staying in touch with people” part of the equation.

With the HipCal acquisition, we will solve this problem. We want to make it easy for you to coordinate setting appointments with other people, set up get-togethers, publish or subscribe to your kid's soccer team schedule, get automatic updates on the schedule for your favorite band, etc.

2)Why does this make sense for Plaxo’s business?

It’s pretty simple. Plaxo makes money when a percentage of our free users convert to premium services and pay a subscription fee. We also make money when our free users choose to send ecards, flowers, or gifts to each other, when they launch a search from Plaxo, when they see an ad on Plaxo, etc.

HipCal gives us:

• More reasons for people to join Plaxo


• More reasons for current users to stay active


• More opportunities to get people to use Plaxo on a daily basis


• More opportunities to launch new premium services

It also gives us five great new members for the Plaxo team.

3) How can you compete with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft in this area?

The short answer is that we won’t really be competing with them. All of those services currently offer address books. We don’t compete with their address books…we simply make them more useful and interoperable. To some extent, the same should be true with calendars.

Beyond that, though, I think it is clear that standalone, web-based calendars aren’t all that useful. A calendar application, even if it has lots of interesting features and a great interface, can’t exist as an island.

To be really useful, a calendaring application will need all of the following:

1. Tight integration into and with the other personal productivity tools people already use


2. The ability to be used anytime, anywhere, across multiple different tools


3. A large network of other users with whom you can set appointments, get together, etc.


4. And, of course, fantastic features and a great interface

Plaxo has already made a lot of progress on 1, 2, and 3. HipCal helps us really accelerate item #4. If a Plaxo member chooses to use one of the services listed above as their primary tool for calendaring—that’s great! We’ll simply help them integrate their calendaring experience with other tools and with other users.

For more on what people are saying, see:

Our press release
Internet News
The Daily Om
Red Herring
Techcrunch

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 :)

If you're running a recent version of the Plaxo toolbar for Outlook or Outlook Express, you'll see the Click to Connect button and drop-down whenever you get an e-mail from someone. One of the options is to "Get a map or directions" for the person that sent you that message. It's handy when you need to visit someone's office or get driving directions to their home.

Well now it's even handier, because when you click that link, you'll get a page with the map embedded inside it. You can toggle between showing your contact's work and home address (if the person has chosen to share that information with you), and you can also click to get driving directions from your own home or work address.

We chose to use Yahoo! Maps for our mashup because they provide automatic geo-coding (turning a mailing address into latitute/longuitude), so it was easy to say "show me a map of Mark Jen's work address" and bam!

Hope you find this fun and useful!

--Joseph Smarr, Plaxo Server Engineer

Believe it or not, a common opening line in support emails is "no one will probably read this, but..." This sentiment is magnified for companies that offer the unusual combination of free service and tech support. Combine this with previous bad experiences with online customer support and the opening line isn’t too surprising.

We consistently beat our target 24-hour response time on standard email support channels and we boast a round-the-clock VIP support channel that's resolving most of our Premium member's issues within a few hours. But we understand that a single email may not have all of the information needed to diagnose a user's problem. Several emails may be sent back and forth before the nature of the issue can be fully understood. Before you know it, 3 days have passed and the member is ready to throw their computer out the window.

We recently decided to offer chat support to cut the wait time and provide immediate support. It wasn’t as simple as adding an icon to our Support page. We needed a tool that was highly reliable (no dropped chats), very low chat latency (it doesn't take 10 seconds before the other person receives what you just typed) and easy to use for the user. But there were many things to also consider besides the obvious. We had to decide on cost, administration, security, back-end requirements, front-end requirements, protocol support, scalability, user convenience, operator convenience, monitoring, real-time statistics and analysis, multi-chat ability, images and so on. And it's a bigger challenge with many providers offering closely the same features.

We also had to hand select from our customer care team that fit this style of support. When answering support emails, you have time on your side - time to research the problem, time to consult with engineers and time to compose a neatly written response. With chat support, everything happens on the spot. It's important to have an answer within seconds, type complete sentences quickly and accurately, and staying away from using IM shortcuts. IMHO, IM shortcuts personally confuse me, LOL. But one of our most unanticipated challenges was training our Live Chat team how to gently let down our customers who ask them out on dates. Who knew that would be one of the most often asked questions?

We’ve found that an overwhelming 98% of those who use Live Chat are satisfied with their support simply because the resolution time is within minutes instead of hours. But is chat for everyone? Probably not. Personally, I prefer shooting out an email and waiting for an answer to read at my convenience. But it's good to offer a different kind of support channel for someone who may need an answer right now than right later.

In our new Plaxo eCards release, you'll find even more ways to add a little personality to your eCards, including one of my favorite new features -- custom card borders.

Three of our graphic designers, Christian Bohland, Michael Rowley, and Bill Tani, came up with the designs, playfully exploring borders made of different physical materials and objects. Terry Chay wrote the algorithm to create the borders across cards of all different sizes and Trevor Gattis engineered the eCards customization panel. Didn't they do a great job?

A wooden frame:	A metal frame:
A cool gel border:	Prickly barbed wire:
An incomplete puzzle edge:	A spray of sunflowers:

And there's more to check out! I must warn you, though. They do get addictive. I went a little crazy this morning creating cards for this post and can't wait to get even more borders up soon...maybe a goth border, shaggy 70's border, bubble wrap border, bling border...hmmmm...

What new borders would you add to Plaxo eCards?

--Janice Ta, Product Manager, Plaxo eCards

One of the coolest aspects of Plaxo is that your address book is self-updating. When Plaxo members in your address book change their contact information, it also gets automatically updated in your address book. Vice versa, when you change your contact info on Plaxo, people who have you in their address book can get your latest info. The importance and value of this feature is increasing rapidly as the Plaxo network continues to grow and the percentage of Plaxo members in your address book continues to rise.

Today we are enhancing this core feature by giving Plaxo members greater control over how they notify others and receive notification of such changes.

Receiving Member-to-Member Notifications

New choices, now available from your communication preferences, include:

• Daily or weekly digest. Instead of getting individual member-to-member e-mail notifications each time someone changes their contact info, you can choose to get a single weekly message.
• Silent update. You have the option to suppress member-to-member notification e-mails globally, or for specific individuals in your address book.

Communicating Your Own Changes

When you’re updating your own contact information online you also have a new “silent mode” option, which still automatically updates Plaxo members who have permission to see your contact info, but withholds sending them an e-mail notification. This option is particularly useful when making small changes to your contact info.

As always, you continue to have control over who gets your home or work contact info via your sharing options .

We hope these changes improve the Plaxo experience even more and as always, we want to hear what you think.

--Dassi Shusterman, Plaxo Product Manager

We recently had our second full-day hackathon at Plaxo, which we affectionately refer to as “Haxo”. [Our first Hackathon was last December, but somehow we never got around to blogging it (doh!).]

For the uninitiated, a Hackathon is a designated day where you’re freed from all your normal daily obligations (meetings, bug fixes, upcoming releases) and you can work on whatever you want. We provided breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and everyone worked frenetically from the morning until late at night. The general rule is that projects have to be somewhat related to the company’s direction, but everyone is encouraged to work on something new and different, and in particular on something that wouldn’t otherwise make it to the top of the priority list. This includes cool new features that might apply to a niche of our user base, fixing some long-standing but low-grade annoyances or bugs, or research about some potential new market or technology. Everyone in the company is encouraged to participate—not just engineers. Some of the PMs and Biz team members rolled up their sleeves and started coding, while others made mock-ups or proposals.

It’s always amazing what a passionate and creative bunch of people can accomplish in a single day. It sometimes makes me wonder if everyday shouldn’t be a Haxo day! Here are some examples of the projects we built during Haxo II:

• Send an SMS to your friend’s phone using Click-to-Connect
• See your friend’s Amazon wish list inside a reminder of their birthday
• Firefox toolbar, with one-click auto-signin access to Plaxo Online
• Highlight any text in a web page and add it to your address book or calendar (using NLP to parse out the different fields of information)
• Send a Plaxo eCard using any photo found on the web
• Sync your bookmarks between Firefox and IE (and access them on Plaxo Online)
• Periodic backup wizard that runs automatically to create a snapshot of your data
• "PlaxoRank" comparison of how connected two contacts are (ala AimFight)
• One-box find-as-you-type search of all your contacts, calendar, tasks, and notes
• Shared group address book
• Tool to collect and report all the unique crashes (with stack traces) from our server farm
• Profiling our web site performance (found several easy ways to make it faster!)
• Internal dashboard of which Plaxo features are being used the most (from our data warehouse)
• Candid photos of everyone at Plaxo

We hope to release some of these new features in our production service soon. And we’re planning to make Haxo a monthly affair, given how successful it’s been so far. But while the things produced during Haxo are always impressive, the most valuable outcome is that everyone leaves so happy and energized. After all, we’re all builders and hackers at heart, and as anyone will tell you, entrepreneurship is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. So the real point of Haxo is to let everyone bask in that 10% a little longer, so we can all do what we really love most.

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

Woo-hoo! The Plaxo Toolbar for Internet Explorer version 1.0 has arrived and we've included some goodies in it for everyone:

1. AIM users: AIM users can now sign in with their AIM screen names and passwords.
2. People who are thoughtful, but lazy: Send eCards directly from the toolbar or while looking at a contact's details. "Thank you" and "Happy Birthday" cards are only a click away.
3. People who are bugged by bugs: While we were at it, we thought we'd fix some bugs too.

Upgrade or download your toolbar now. It's good stuff: http://www.plaxo.com/ietoolbar

Janice Ta, IE Toolbar Product Manager

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.

You've been saving time all year by using Plaxo, so now, with the holidays approaching, why not spend some of that savings playing our new game.

For those of you who aren't using Plaxo yet, maybe this new feature will be the tipping point...

Enjoy! The Plaxo Team

I love reading about people who have discovered Plaxo's Backup/Restore feature. Here are a few that I recently came across:

Plaxo address book backup

It's free, and it saved my behind: Plaxo

Plaxo - You Gotta Use It to Manage Contacts!

What!?!? You're not familiar with Plaxo's Backup/Restore feature! Actually, it wouldn't surprise me if many members were unaware of this extremely valuable and useful feature of Plaxo. The Backup/Restore feature is really a by-product of how the service works (don't tell engineering I said that), so we probably don't make as big a deal of it as we should. But I can tell you it's one of my favorite features of Plaxo.

I can point to testimonial after testimonial where Plaxo's Backup/Restore feature has helped to save the day for a member in distress. The story is always similar - the member experiences some major happening and loses EVERYTHING on their local system. Sometimes it's a system failure, a lost laptop, or stolen system. Any IT expert will tell you that these things do happen and unfortunately, most people do not backup their data so they are left to piece back together their important information.

While we can't help them to restore all of their lost local data, in most cases Plaxo can help to restore their lost contacts, calendar, tasks, and notes information within a matter of minutes. For many, this is some of their most important information that would be nearly impossible to rebuild.

Basically, here's how Plaxo's Backup/Restore feature works.

Imagine that member Bob installs the Plaxo software on his local system. The software helps to keep his local information synchronized with his Plaxo Online account. Bob has a 100 entries in his local address book which are automatically synchronized with his Plaxo Online account. The software regularly checks in with the Plaxo service to make sure the information is always synchronized. The sychronized copy is necessary in order for Plaxo do it's primary magic, but it also has the additional benefit of keeping an up-to-date current copy of Bob's information (there are other benefits, that I'll discuss in later posts).

Now imagine Bob has a system crash and loses all of his local data. Normally Bob would have to remember the 100 people he previously had in his address book. But because Bob is a Plaxo member, he can simply reinstall Plaxo onto his new system and reattach to his existing Plaxo account. Within minutes, Plaxo will restore the 100 contacts existing within his Plaxo account to his local address book. If Bob also had any calendar, notes, and task entries, these would also be restored locally.

Quick, easy, and automatic.

Have you used Plaxo's Backup/Restore feature? We'd love to hear your story too.

Stacy Martin
Plaxo Privacy Officer
privacy @t plaxo.com

Posted by Stacy Martin at October 05, 2005 @ 10:48 AM | Comments () | TrackBack (0)

In our continuing series on the new Plaxo Alerts. In the previous article, I talked about how the alert color helps to identify the type of alert you have received.

We tried to design the Plaxo Alerts to be aesthetically appealing and crisp, while presenting the important details.

The