Of all the community events working towards an open social web, the most productive and insightful--and the one I look forward to most--is the bi-annual Internet Identity Workshop, held in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. That's where OpenID was really debated and matured to the phenomenon it is today, and it's also where all the people behind related (and would-be competing) ideas like CardSpace, Liberty, Sxip, LID, and so on came together and found a way to converge their visions and work together. It's also where Plaxo learned to deeply understand and embrace open standards, community involvement, user-centric identity, and the crucial balance of idealism and pragmatism required to get an open vision meaningfully deployed in the real world.

All this happens at IIW because the right people are there, and the workshop fosters the right attitude. It's not a traditional conference--it's an un-conference-style workshop hosted and attended by peers. Most of the thought leaders who are developing the new concepts and technologies you've heard about for identity, security, and data-exchange on the web will be there, alongside the people who are bringing those ideas inside AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, and other companies that can deliver these things to millions of users. And there are also individuals and small companies that want to learn about this space more deeply and find out of they contribute to the conversation.

If you're one of those people, you should try to come to IIW. This is my third IIW, and every time I meet more amazing people, learn a ton (both at the conceptual and technical levels), and leave with a renewed sense of energy and optimism that we can deliver the future we want. The people who come here are passionate about what they do, and they're always happy to explain their ideas and motivations to new people who want to get involved. At my first IIW, I didn't know anything about most of the concepts that are now at the center of my work at Plaxo on opening up the social web. I owe a debt of gratitude to everyone at IIW that took the time to help me understand, and I'm pleased to now be in a position where I can do some of that teaching as well.

At the next IIW (December 3-5), we're sure to talk about OpenID, oAuth, identity consolidation, friends-list portability, and more. Plaxo will of course be there (and we're pleased to help sponsor this time as well). The spirit you'll feel at IIW is that we're all in this together, and together we can make great things happen. I'll see you there.

--Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect

We awoke this morning to find a great story on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle about Lunch 2.0! The article mentions Plaxo's involvement in Lunch 2.0's nascency, including the saga of hiring Mark Jen (who turned out to be as good at designing products as he was at getting free lunch).

The most recent Lunch 2.0 was hosted by our long-time friends—and new neighbors—at LinkedIn; it's hard to think of a more fitting place to do some web 2.0 networking! Come to think of it, it's been a while since Plaxo hosted one of these events. We just might have to do something about that...say sometime in July... ;)

There has been a lot of buzz in the news in the past week or so regarding a change in Daylight Saving Time. For the past twenty years, DST has started on the first Sunday of April, but as a provision of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, it will change to the second Sunday of March, which in 2007 is this Sunday, March 11.

For people in the tech community, this change is not as simple as turning a clock forward one hour. Since so many computer systems depend on time, the change means late hours for programmers like me so our users can sleep easy knowing that a computer glitch won’t make the users of their applications late for any appointments next week. Since over 15 million people across the globe depend on Plaxo to store and organize their address books and calendar data, we have spent the past couple weeks working to make our system configurations are in ship-shape and we will stay posted next week in the event that any DST-related problems arise.

Many people are reminded of Y2K craze that hit the nation a few years ago. Some of you may be delighted by the fact that you may have another chance to justify the bomb shelter you built 8 years ago, which by now has become merely a storage room for Beanie Babies, VCRs, Ricky Martin albums, and other items that have become obsolete since the dawning of the new millennium. For the rest of you, I think it is safe to say we do not have to worry about a nuclear holocaust so much as our microwave clocks being off by an hour on Sunday, along with all other appliances which have not been programmed to deal with the change.

You may be thinking "What else can I do to prepare for the new DST law?" Most home computers will be updated automatically to deal with the change. Windows users can visit this page which will walk you through a process to confirm your system’s DST integrity. Other than that, see that those you work with are aware of the change by confirming your appointments. So make sure to remind your friends, families, and coworkers that some of their electronic devices might be "misbehaving" and for the ones who don’t use Plaxo, remind them not to miss any appointments ;).

Update: Those of you who are using Outlook may have noticed that some of your recurring calendar events were off by an hour this morning. This has nothing to with Plaxo -- it's a known Outlook bug (they store hard-coded version of the DST rules upon event creation, so old recurring events will have the wrong DST rules). Microsoft has released a tool that finds and fixes these events. You can download it here.

--Glenn Dixon, HipCal Engineer

The product management team is off to Austin for the South by Southwest Interactive conference tomorrow morning. For half the team, it'll be their first time in Austin so in addition to the conference, we'll be hitting up 6th street, eating at Salt Lick, and riding mechanical bulls at Midnight Rodeo.

If you're a web 2.0 startup and you're looking for an address book to mash up with, we'd love to make your acquaintance. And if you're a Plaxo user, we've been busy working on a lot of cool new stuff over the past few months. Find us at SXSW and we can give you a sneak peek of what's coming. Drop me an e-mail or IM and we'll meet up at the trade show or one of the panels. I think y'all will be quite impressed :)

-- Mark Jen
Product Line Manager

People ask us all the time, 'Do you have frog legs?'

And we always answered, 'No, we just walk that way.'
Well, no more. Not since Gil entered our lives. Gil's the company pet. Wendy got her from from the Grow-a-Frog company. The frog growing kit had been sitting in my garage for about 10 years and it was an easy last-minute idea for our secret santa gift exchange here at Plaxo. I was a little embarrassed, thinking people might not like it, or that maybe the company had gone out of business. But Wendy sent in the paperwork and got herself a mail order frog.

Naming her was a group project. The suggestions? Red. Ole Blue Eyes. Spermatazoa--Zoe for short. And Pierre--you know, because she's French. Wendy suggested Gil and it just fit.

Gil has brought much joy to the Quality Assurance department at Plaxo. We've watched as she's transformed from a small pollywog to a kidney-bean-sized amphibian. Over the days we've watched her grow legs (first back, then front) and lose her tail. Gil's a happy frog. (Why? She eats whatever bugs her.) Gil's always telling us frog jokes like that. Here's our favorite:

A man was crossing a road one day when a frog called out to him and said, 'If you kiss me, I'll turn into a beautiful princess.' He bent over, picked up the frog and put it in his pocket.

The frog spoke up again and said, 'If you kiss me and turn me back in to a beautiful princess, I will tell everyone how smart and brave you are and how you are my hero.' The man took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it and returned it to his pocket.

The frog spoke up again and said, 'If you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, I will be your loving companion for an entire week.' The man took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it and returned it to his pocket.

The frog then cried out, 'If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I'll stay with you for a year and do ANYTHING you want.' Again the man took the frog out, smiled at it and put it back into his pocket.

Finally, the frog asked, 'What's the matter? I told you I'm a beautiful princess and that I'll stay with you for a year and do anything you want. Why won't you kiss me?'

The man said, 'Look, I'm a programmer. I don't have time for a girlfriend. But a talking frog? Now, that's cool!'

I guess you had to be there.

-- Michael Rowley
Creative Director, Plaxo

A group of us from Plaxo found out last night when our own Glenn "Fiddich" Dixon from HipCal competed in the Guitar Hero tournament hosted by Meebo. His challenge was formiddable: if he lost in the first round, he would suffer embarassment; if he won the entire tournament, he would be embarassed for a different reason. His goal was thus a solid middle-of-the-pack performance, and that is exactly what he delivered.

The tournament drew quite a crowd.

Glenn (left) plays his heart out.

In his opening performance he won convincingly over his opponent on the song "Cherry Pie". Of the 16 competitors, he clearly showed a talent level that put him near the top. His second round song choice was "Can't You Hear Me Knocking?" and his opponent was one of the favorites to win the tournament. It was a seesaw matchup and ultimately Glenn suffered a narrow and nobel defeat. The contestants that made it to the final round were indeed masters of their game, and we were humbled by their performance.

All in all it was a fun night, and it was particularly nice to see so many Plaxites come and show their support for our guy!

A couple of us from Plaxo went to Dojo Developer Day #2 (or 3D2, as the locals called it) this past weekend, hosted at AOL's mountain view campus. We've been making extensive use of Dojo in some of our new soon-to-be-released web development, and it's been really valuable.

If you haven't heard of dojo, it's a major open-source project to build high-quality reusable JavaScript code that solves many of the common problems you face when building an Ajax app (working across browsers, separating your code into modules, making API calls, etc.) and also empowers you to build cooler apps fastert (animation, drag-n-drop, widgets, etc.).

In addition to the general discussion about the future of dojo, highlights for us included chatting with the lfx-animation authors (which we've been really stressing in some of our work), Alex Russell's talk about improving performance (something we're focused heavily on right now), and some cool dojo-enabled show-and-tell projects, including a sweet real-estate search site that makes me want to buy a house in Colorado. :)

It's great to see the energy and sense of community behind Dojo, and we're glad to be along for the ride!

Plaxo's Joseph Smarr will be at the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) this Mon-Wed at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. If you're attending the workshop, come by and say hi!

At Plaxo, we're always looking for new and better ways to help our users access and sync their contact and calendar data across the sites, apps, and services that they use on a daily basis. The status quo is that every new service we want to sync with requires our users to enter a new login/password and requires Plaxo to implement a new authentication and data access scheme. Clearly this does not scale well. We look forward to the day when users can authenticate once, perhaps using something like OpenID 2.0, and then immediately connect Plaxo to a host of services--many of which we've never even heard of before--and the authorization and data access will be automatic, transparent, and secure, because of the open standards and protocols being used.

The technologies being discussed at the IIW (including OpenID, Sxip, Liberty, and more) are the most promising developments towards this vision, and we're excited to share our ideas and real-world challenges in support of this important work.

From the "what's life without a passion outside work" files... I've been working for the past three years on learning to play the piano and accompany myself singing (I've been singing for many years now, since learning Indian music as a child). It's been a great challenge; learning a complex instrument, a new genre of music (the blues and jazz), and singing while playing.

Anyway, my teacher had her annual student recital yesterday, and I sang and played "How Long Blues." It's tradtional blues, first popularized (I think) by Big Bill Broonzy. This version is an improvised arrangement I created for piano and vocal, based on a version by Big Joe Turner and Pete Johnson.

Here's the video:

Would love your feedback. Hope you enjoy it!

-- Swami, VP of Business Development

So here was my mistake that led me to write this post. I was chatting with a co-worker, discussing my long held belief that the executive assistant is the easiest way to judge the true persona of an executive. My theory was so enjoyed that it was suggested I blog it. Many thanks, I will eventually return the favor…..

So my theory goes like this:

I have been an EA for a lot of years, and worked for several companies, large and small. Over the years my theory has almost always held true.

In my line of work, I am constantly communicating with other executive assistants, coordinating complicated schedules and meetings. Sometimes these interactions are very simple and pleasant. Sometimes they are so painful and political it gives me a headache. Whenever these little interactions are over, I usually have a pretty decent picture of the executive’s personality, without ever speaking with them.

One of my favorite things to do is to be around to greet an exec when it's time for the first meeting (to prove myself right). For example, if the EA is easy to work with, pleasant, always follows up, etc., chances are the exec is a low maintenance, generally nice person who treats them with respect. If the EA is a harried, unorganized mess who can’t remember what the action item was and never calls me back, I assume the exec is constantly throwing them curve balls, leaving them out of the loop a lot and is possibly a yeller. If the EA is just rude, demanding that the meeting happen at their preferred location, at their preferred time, and never tries to be considerate of the other schedules involved, I assume that the executive is a bit of a megalomaniac and has hired a gatekeeper to protect them and to encourage others to be deferential and to stroke the exec’s massive ego.

And then there are the idiot EAs. The ones that make me wonder how they manage to drive to work each day without getting lost. Usually these EA’s are extremely attractive women (think vapid Barbie) who are hired by very vain men. These exec’s are convinced that appearances are more important than efficiency and substance (Many of the EA’s that I have worked with over the years are very attractive people who are also extremely good at their jobs. You know who you are, and I'm not talking about you.).

The final type is the bossy EA. This is the person who thinks that they really, truly run the company. They know everything about the company, and always have their executive’s schedule memorized. They try to keep their hands in everything and tend to have control issues. This exec is usually insanely busy and appreciates structure. Some would say I fall into this category. I can be a bit bossy and perhaps tend to pester if I think a meeting may be missed. I think my boss needs this. Does he think he needs this? I don’t know, I never asked.

-- Randi Melo, Executive Assistant to the CEO

A bunch of us from Plaxo (Rikk, Joseph, Dan, and I) had the opportunity to attend the Singularity Summit over at Stanford this past Saturday, including a special reception afterwards at the Computer History Museum just down the road from us.

What’s the Singularity? There are different ways to describe it, but the subtitle from Ray Kurzweil’s book on the topic, The Singularity is Near, is “When Evolution Transcends Biology.” There were many speakers, representing a diversity of views. Some of the highlights for me included:

Seeing Kurzweil live. He wowed us with a demo of a product that I would describe as an intelligent camera for the blind. Point the camera at a page of text, and it reads it out loud. Let your hand stray a bit, and the camera tells you that it is not being pointed squarely at the page (and directs you to point it downward 30 degrees). And according to Ray: point it at a pet, and it can tell you whether it’s a cat or a dog. (With thanks to Google Image search for giving access to millions of dog and cat pictures to train the AI behind it to pattern match dog vs. cat.)

Douglas Hofstadter’s use of hand-drawn cartoons to illustrate his points. In contrast, during Nick Bostrom’s talk, which covered “existential risks” to humanity (including that our universe is just a computer simulation that might get turned off), I found myself wishing to add one more risk to his slides: “death by PowerPoint.” (Nick, not targeting you on that; just a general comment about lengthy, text-heavy slide decks.)

Sebastian Thrun’s presentation on Stanford’s win in the DARPA-funded robotic car race. He shared hilarious video clips of various mishaps, including, believe it or not, a robotic motorcycle that fell over within feet of the start.

Eric Drexler’s presentation on nano-manufacturing. He mentioned that M.I.T. has added the first new Course (department) in a very long time: Biological Engineering. I pay attention to that sort of stuff now – in part, because I failed to grasp the true importance of there being a “Materials Science” Course as part of the core curriculum back in the early ‘80’s.

And lastly, Bill McKibben’s haunting talk in favor of restraint. He offered that the two most important inventions of the 20th Century were wilderness preserves and non-violent protest. There was a strange irony to his talk, in that the only “anti-tech” speaker was presenting not in person, but via a cool videoconferencing technology that projected a life-size image of him onto a glass surface, behind a lectern. It really looked at times as if he were in the room with us. I found myself wondering if perhaps he were in fact an AI, and that we were witnessing a public Turing test!

Overall, it was a really interesting event. My congratulations and thanks to Tyler Emerson and the Singularity Institute for Articificial Intelligence for a great job organizing it (and thanks for inviting some of us from Plaxo to attend!).

There were also numerous references to Internet topics, like social networking and Google. And I got into a number of great conversations about how a “smart address book” can play a vital, even central role in our ever more digital, networked lives.

There is a lot of “tech talk” on this site; for a change, I wanted to take a moment to do some reflection about a new Plaxo benefit. During the past 8-weeks, I have researched and designed a new paid Parental Leave policy here at Plaxo.

I want to thank Mischa for volunteering to be Plaxo’s “test case”! Mischa is our newest mom, at Plaxo. Mischa worked with me in order to help me “come up to speed” on the issues. Mazel Tov and congratulations to you, Mischa! Also, thank you, Ben, for championing this new policy, approving of one of the most generous and unique paid parental leave policies in Silicon Valley for a new Internet startup.

So, you might be asking, “what is the problem”? Did you know that parental leave is guaranteed as a result of federal and state legislation? California has led the way in the U.S. and has one of the most progressive parental leave standards in the U.S. However, this is poorly paid or unpaid leave! Have you ever tried to live on your state disability insurance? The U.S. is the only industrialized country in the world that doesn’t have fully paid parental leave other than Australia. There are 163 countries in the world that give women paid leave with the birth of a child, and 45 countries that give fathers the right to paid parental leave.

As I researched Plaxo’s new policy, I found myself sort of blazing new territory on this one, especially when it came to defining a fully paid parental leave policy. Some of the local Silicon Valley profitable firms offer paid parental leave. But how many pre-IPO startups offer fully paid parental leave to their employees?

In California, the only way for a parent to take paid parental leave is to file for State Disability Insurance or Paid Family Leave. However, when you calculate it all out, these sources of income are dismal at best. So, we decided that parental leave, before, during, or after the birth of a child, for whatever reason, isn’t necessarily a disability. It is natural (did you know that a vast majority of all women become mothers?) and we, at Plaxo, believe corporations need to support our parent’s and children’s needs. And, we mean really support them, with financial support.

We decided to look at supplemental approaches to state disability insurance. One way we came up with is to provide fully paid parental leave to supplement their state sponsored disability and paid family leave insurance. We will pay our Plaxo parents an amount equal to their current salary (minus whatever the state or feds give them) for up to 6-weeks in order to care for their newborns before, during or after birth, for whatever reason.

Although we lose our employee’s productivity during their paid parental leave, we believe they will become more thoughtful and more productive Plaxo employees when they return to work.

So that’s it. I work for Plaxo, a leader in paid parental leave. If you wish to sponsor such a policy at your own company and you would like to chat, please feel free to contact me directly.

Respectfully submitted,

Stuart Liroff
Sr. Director of Human Resources
stuart@plaxo.com

In addition to the blast from the past Todd just mentioned, we just uploaded a video that was created at our third Haxo day a few weeks ago. Here's the YouTube clip:

All throughout the day Redgee ran around with a video camera and took short clips of us holding up these blank whiteboards; we had no idea what he was doing with the clips until last week when he unveiled his masterpiece at the company-wide Haxo show-and-tell.

If you liked the clip, Redgee also tried a few other songs; check out these alternate versions too!

This time around we focused the hackathon around building cool little tools that we could actually ship (yup we heard your feedback from our last Haxo post). We've got a few that are almost ready to go live, so stay tuned for when we launch Plaxo Labs! :)

-- Mark Jen, Product Manager

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

[Mark, this is for you. ;-) ]

Someone sent me a list of quotes from famous people doubting one thing or another (see the list below). Whenever things are getting difficult at Plaxo, I read this and it recharges me. I'd like to print these on the walls of our office to inspire people. (btw: Thanks to whoever sent this to me!)

So what are we gonna doubt next?

It's easy and fun to look at folks in the past and assume that we're not like them, that we're modern, civilized and open-minded. But, of course, most us are not. So, here's my short list of things that I believe will become reality (whether we like them or not), and have plenty of doubters today:

• Stem cell use
  
• Cloning
  
• Nano-tech
  
• Gay marriage
  
• Singularity (a la Kurzweil)
  
• Space travel
  
• Parallel universes (whoa!)
  
• Robot cars
  
• Robot spouses :-o
  
• A unified democratic party
  
• Universal address book :-)
  

btw: I'm not predicting that these are all "good" things, but rather, that they will become normal in the future. I'd love to hear what things you think I've missed.

On the other hand

In an attempt to be fair and balanced, there is another side to doubt: Doubt: A History : The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson (although I agree with the Washington Post's review that Hecht's book is really not about "doubt" and that she tends to focus on a few successful doubters).

Oh, I almost forgot the list:

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
--Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
--Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

"I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year."
--The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957

"But what ... is it good for?"
--Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
--Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977

"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us."
--Western Union internal memo, 1876

"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?"
--David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.

"The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'c,' the idea must be feasible."
--A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)

"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"
--H.M.Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927.

"I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face and not Gary Cooper."
--Gary Cooper on his decision not to take the leading role in "Gone with the wind."

"A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, the market research reports say America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make."
--Response to Debbi Field's idea of starting Mrs. Fields' Cookies.

"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out."
--Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.

"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."
--Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1885.

"If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can't do this."
--Spencer Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M "Post-It" Notepads.

"So we went to Atari and said, 'hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' and they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.'"
--Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and H-P interested in his and Steve Wozniak's personal computer.

"Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."
--1921 New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard's revolutionary rocket work.

"You want to have consistent and uniform muscle development across all of your muscles? It can't be done. It's just a fact of
life. You just have to accept inconsistent muscle development as an unalterable condition of weight training."
--Response to Arthur Jones, who solved the "unsolvable" problem by inventing Nautilus.

"Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You're crazy."
--Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill for oil in 1859.

"Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau."
--Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929.

"Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value."
--Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieule de Guerre.

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
--Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.

"Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction."
--Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872.

"The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon."
--sir John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, appointed Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria 1873.

"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
--Bill Gates, 1981

Here's one that is more inspirational:

"Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future."
-John F. Kennedy .

OSCON has grown up from its humble beginnings as a conference for the hackers in the Perl language over a decade ago to the premiere conference on open source software and practices. As conference organizer, Nathan Torkington, likes to put it: “In Babylon 5 terms, open source is our last best hope for software.”

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that at Plaxo, open source is our lifeblood. Our infrastructure is built on Linux, MySQL, and hundreds of other open source tools and libraries. Ecards uses the open-source LAMP stack in order to speed development, Thunderbird was one of our first supported clients and available under an open-source and public license, The Plaxo Open API enables the open-source practice of “mash-ups” to allow you to move your data outside our “information silo”, When people see how our Address Book Widget puts that mash-up power in the hands of anyone, they think there must be a catch. The only catch here is the principle stated in our privacy policy: “Your information is yours (not ours).”—an inherently “open-source” idea.

It is because we build on it (operations and eCards), provide it in code (Thunderbird client), and live its principles (Open API and widget), that it makes sense that we would want to participate more in the community. Luckily at this year’s OSCON, we have a chance to do so in the form of three talks.

• I’m giving a talk “Underpants Gnomes eCards” in the PHP track to explain from a “developer in the trenches” perspective how a revenue product was created using LAMP. Hopefully it will be a little fun to see the things we got right, as well as some of the missteps we made along the way.


• Joseph, who wrote the Address Book Widget, will explain all the interesting problems he ran into when creating Web 2.0 “mash-up” in his “Cross-site Ajax” talk.


• Finally, I put a talk about some of the practical Ajax design patterns we use here at Plaxo in a “0-60 Ajax” talk.

At 5:12 am this morning, the Bay Area marked the 100th anniversary of the Great San Francisco Earthquake.

Almost twenty years ago, I had the opportunity to meet with a survivor of the Great Quake, when I was doing some volunteer work in a convalescent ward.

“Jack” was an enterprising 10 year-old living in San Francisco when the earthquake struck. Among other things, the 7.8 magnitude quake knocked out all of the telegraph lines, severely disrupting the operations of the large west coast railroad companies, most of which had their headquarters in the city. In the days after the earthquake, Jack got a job running messages from the rail yards to the headquarters of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Apparently, he so impressed the company brass that they hired him on and, ultimately, paid for him to go to school. He continued to work for the railroad through the ensuring decades, opening up new routes, helping the company manage the transition to diesel engines, living through the mergers, expansions, etc. until he retired at the age of 77, having spent sixty seven years of his life working for the same company!

Fairly impressive, especially for those of us in an industry where most companies are hardly more than a few years old. Yet, despite this wonderful history, Jack did have some cautionary words about devoting your life to a company. “After all,” Jack pointed out, “No one from the railroad has come to visit me in the hospital.” Buildings can fall. Companies can merge or disappear. But, ultimately, it is our connection to people, rather than institutions, that prove the most lasting.

Plaxo is business. But it's not business all the time. We're a tight group. We respect each other. We don't ever take sides. Except maybe in bowling. Bowling together, we settle scores, but we enjoy our time. We're good to each other. Like family.

Trevor bowls with style and grace.

Jie knocking down pins.

Joseph's left hook.

Swami, Ben, Huy, and Stuart

Drew Colace watches Joseph's back

Jing keeps score

Every year, there has been talk about having a Plaxo Ski Trip, but it had never happened. Well, this year it finally did :)

This past weekend, 14 of us went up to North Lake Tahoe for some skiing and snowboarding. Peter graciously hosted us at his cabin in Tahoe Donner and since we had so many people, we rented a condo nearby for additional sleeping arrangements. Many of us left Thursday night and spent Friday at Northstar.

The rest of the crew drove up and joined us Friday night. People split off between Northstar and Squaw on Saturday, but we reunited for dinner and games afterwards.

All in all, the first annual Plaxo Ski Trip was a success; can't wait 'till next year! :D

--Mark Jen

Any Plaxo members out there want to join our Plaxo Fantasy Baseball league? We're a few spots short of a league, so we thought it would be fun to invite a couple of Plaxo members to join us!

For those of you familiar with Fantasy Baseball, we will be running a weekly Head-to-Head Points league. This is your chance you be your own baseball manager: ... building your team through a draft, trading with other managers in the league, and filling out your lineup. Lineup changes are weekly, so it shouldn't take too much time.

We are planning on conducting our online live draft later this week, so you can pick your team yourself or have your team auto-selected based upon pre-draft rankings. Our fantasy league starts next Monday and will run for 24 weeks with the top 4 teams making the playoffs. Plaxo prizes will be given to the winners. Who knows... maybe we'll let the winner pick their own favoriate feature in put into the next release of Plaxo :-).

If you're interested, please let The Commish know and I'll send you the details!!! It'll be fun, and you'll get to compete against your favoriate Plaxo employees! Come and join us!!!

The Commish

P.S. The only thing I ask is you be a Plaxo member :-)

Part of the rationale for Plaxo is a belief that, while the past 10 years of the Internet has made it easier to connect people to information and businesses, the record has been far more mixed when it comes to connecting people to each other.

Ten years ago, Robert Putnam published a paper (and subsequent book) called "Bowling Alone". The central thesis was that there had been a great decline in “social capital” since the 1970’s. Rates of participation in a broad range of civic engagement had all undergone huge declines, from political participation (down 25%), to attendance at PTA meetings (down 61%), to charitable giving (down 20%), to participation in clubs, fraternal and service organizations, etc. (down 58%). Even purely social forms of engagement, such as inviting friends over for dinner (down 45%) or joining bowling leagues (down 70%, hence the title of the book) had declined significantly.

All of this was disturbing, because if people don’t have connections with the other members of their community, they are less likely to be able to band together to deal with problems, be they environmental, educational, social, etc.

Of course, all of this was before the Internet had really taken off. And while the trends discussed above appear to have continued, is it possible that the old ways of building social capital have been replaced with new forms? People now join virtual communities, enabling them to form common cause with people who feel the same way that they do about the rainforest or Howard Dean. Or, they can find people who are dealing with the same medical issues that they are. An organization that I have been involved with for a number of years, Partners for Youth with Disability, has embraced online communities as a way of helping kids with physical disabilities to connect with peers and adult mentors—something that was often difficult to do in the physical world given mobility issues. And, while we may be bowling alone, we are participating in MUDs and online poker tournaments in record numbers.

So, is there still cause for concern? Are people really engaging with each other more because of the Internet? Have the social uses of the Internet substituted for more passive forms of entertainment (are we watching TV less and blogging more?), or has online interaction taken away from time spent with friends, neighbors, and family? A recent report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project seems to take the more positive view of the Internet’s impact on social capital. What do you think? Can service like Plaxo help generate social capital (in addition to the more traditional financial forms of capital)?

From all of us here at Plaxo:

Created by Plaxo eCards (beta)

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 confess. I blog and I read blogs. I think they are great and I'm addicted. There... I've said it, so I guess I'm now on my way to recovery.

My blogging activity generally centers around things related to Plaxo, but I've recently started branching out more. Like many, I'll uses blogs to keep tabs on news, sports, politics, humor, and technology, but I also like to track discussions that mention Plaxo. Services such as Bloglines and Technorati are extremely useful for staying on top of the many topics that pop-up each day, and members alike often bring things to my attention.

If there is a discussion or article I feel I can add to, I usually make it a point to reach out and post a comment. Admittedly, this sometimes freaks people out. I guess it catches them off guard that anyone from a company would take the time to respond to their small corner of the world. Some cynics have viewed my posts as a PR stunt. My personal favorite was when I was accused of being a robot.

Certainly, I can't control what people think, but let me tell you why I blog: because it's the right thing to do!!! Here at Plaxo, we have an environment that encourages blogging and other forms of direct communications with users. Our CEO blogs, as do many other employees of Plaxo.

I personally feel the level of support provided by many companies today is less that desireable (that's a nice way of saying horrible). My perception is that many companies simply hide behind their support organizations.

I think responsible companies need to reach out to their users and encourage feedback and discussion - good or bad - about how they are performing. Companies should engage in discussions with users so they can learn how to better improve their products or services. What better way to achieve this than through blogging???

So please, blog away! Tell us what you think on your own terms in your own blog. Does Plaxo work for you? How do you use it? What do you like? What don't you like? What would you change? You don't even have to be a member. I've found the best feedback comes from people who don't use the service. The feedback is used to drive the direction of our service. And if I find your blog and respond, hopefully I won't freak you out!

(Note: if you trackback to this entry, that will also make sure we see it!)

Stacy Martin
Plaxo Privacy Officer
privacy @t plaxo.com

I noticed the Anti-Spyware Coalition (ASC) recently released their final working report of Spyware definitions. They offer the following definition for Spyware and Other Potentially Unwanted Technologies:

Technologies deployed without appropriate user consent and/or implemented in ways that impair user control over:
- Material changes that affect their user experience, privacy, or system security;
- Use of their system resources, including what programs are installed on their computers; and/or
- Collection, use, and distribution of their personal or other sensitive information.

I think the coalition has done a great job in trying to define what spyware and malware are and I hope their efforts prove beneficial in fighting these types of unwanted technologies. We fully support their efforts and you can/should too!.

I recall back in the early days of Plaxo (yes - all of two and half years ago), the occasional claim that Plaxo was spyware. Many of these claims were traced back to an erroneous article that stated Plaxo hacked Outlook profile passwords as we collected personal information. The reporter of the article later retracted his statement, saying he was misinformed and apologized for passing along erroneous information. Unfortunately, this was well after his misinformation was widely distributed and repeated by others.

But this incident underscored the need to better educate people about spyware, which is part of what the ASC is designed to do. The ASC is committed to improving anti-spyware tools, users' understanding of their options, and communication among all stakeholders about how the technology works. They are certainly not alone in the fight against spyware, so by helping to define what spyware is, anti-spyware vendors can focus their attention on improving their anti-spyware tools. What I really like about the work the ASC has done so far is how it focuses the definition on unwanted behavior, while leaving the door open to continually modify the definition over time.

From Plaxo's perspective, thankfully as we've has grown over the past few years, I feel we've overcome many of the early misperceptions. There's certainly more work to be done, but I do feel people recognize Plaxo as a trusted service and software.

Most people understand that Plaxo is an online contact management service with an optional software component. We provide proper notice and require explicit member consent prior to joining Plaxo and installing the software. Plaxo includes no additional software components, and does nothing to impair a member's control over their own system. We've made great effort to ensure our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy are written in plain and simple language, and should someone wish to remove Plaxo, the software can easily be uninstalled. These are the proper behaviors of legitimate software, which I'm sure the ASC would agree.

If you want to learn more about the Anti-Spyware Coalition, be sure to check out their web site: http://www.antispywarecoalition.org/.

Like many in the industry, I awaited the Supreme Court�s ruling in the MGM v. Grokster case with great interest, but also some degree of ambivalence about the right outcome. Anyone who has worked for a software company knows the importance of protection of copyright, and the stifling effect that piracy can have on the incentives for innovation. By the same token, this case sets (and potentially breaks) some significant precedents. Now, more than ever, the providers of devices and services bear responsibilities for the actions of their users and customers. The spectre of mutli-year and multi-million dollar legal suits arising against companies for the actions of a few of their customers could itself stifle innovation, especially in such still-evolving areas as P2P computing and digital media.

For those of you not familiar with the case, entertainment giants such as MGM, Disney, and Time Warner asked the Supreme Court to reverse lower court rulings that held that peer�to-peer file sharing companies such as Grokster and StreamCast Networks aren't responsible when their users illegally download music and other copyrighted content. The lower court ruling was based substantially on the 1984 Betamax Case, which provided a safe-harbor for companies who distribute devices (such as a VCR), that might be used by some individuals to infringe copyrights, if the device had substantial non-infringing uses as well.

The importance of the case was evidenced by the volume of friend of the court briefs filed. Briefs in favor of the studies were filed by from Americans for Tax Reform, Major League Baseball, and the Justice Department, to the Christian Coalition, the Eagles, and Cheryl Crow. Briefs in favor of Grokster were filed by the ACLU, Chuck D, Kazaa, the Consumer Electronics Association, and the Computer and Communications Industry Association.

The Supreme Court has ruled unanimously: Internet file-sharing services may be sued if they encourage customers to swap songs and movies illegally. In the text of his opinion, Justice Souter established that lower courts could find file-sharing services responsible by examining factors such as whether the companies marketed the product to deliberately highlight its use for infringing purposes or whether they took easily available steps to reduce infringing uses. In essence, the safe harbor of �substantial non-infringing uses� appears to still be there, but companies can find themselves ailing out of that harbor if through �purposeful, culpable expression and conduct� they encourage the use of their products or services for illegal purposes.

What does this mean for Plaxo? On surface, probably not much. The content that people share using Plaxo is their own contact information. However, like any service with over 5 million users, there are no doubt at least a few people who are busily thinking of ways to leverage the service for less than legitimate ends. Our responsibilities from a legal standpoint seem to be consistent with our company values: create a service that provides a wide variety of legitimate uses, market and educate to our users about the proper uses (e.g. Plaxo Etiquette), and take reasonable steps to prevent abuse.

As for the implications to the industry as a whole...I�m sure that we�ll be hearing a lot more from the various sides on the impact this will have. Depending on who you believe, this ruling will either cause the premature death of untold numbers of innovative, products and services or �power[s] the digital future�lay[ing] the groundwork for the dawn of a new day � an opportunity that will bring the entertainment and technology communities even closer together.� The truth probably lies somewhere in-between. Nine justices can�t all be wrong, can they?