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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yahoo has been working fast and furious to help their users take their Yahoo account with them across the web using open standards. Today they've released a limited test of a major enhancement to their OpenID provider: when you sign up for Plaxo with your Yahoo ID, you can now opt-in to sharing your Yahoo! profile data--full name, nickname, e-mail address, gender, language, and timezone--almost everything you need to get up and running with Plaxo or most other services. (During this limited test roll-out, sharing of profile data will be available to a few sites, including Plaxo and Jyte.) Best of all, we can now auto-validate your Yahoo! e-mail address (since it's coming from Yahoo!), rather than having to send you one of those e-mail messages to click and confirm you really own it. Yahoo! thus joins Google in their ability to provide an auto-validated email address during sign up, but they've now gone further than any major OpenID provider by also sharing the rest of the profile data. This is a great step forward for Yahoo, relying parties like Plaxo, and the Open Web--congrats are certainly in order!

This announcement comes on the heels of Yahoo's pioneering usability studies on OpenID, which they published for everyone to benefit from (they even went a step further by hosting an OpenID UX Summit on their campus). And Yahoo! is eating their own dogfood--they also recently streamlined and clarified their own OpenID flow. These guys are on a roll, and they've been great to work with!

At the recent Internet Identity Workshop--an biannual gathering of people working on OpenID and related technologies--the folks at Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, MySpace, and others were all very focused on "how can we make OpenID work better for mainstream users", and the clear consensus was to a) improve the UX, and b) share more data when signing up for a new site. Clearly a lot is happening already in the first category, and Yahoo!'s announcement today marks some serious progress in the second one. The hot topic next is how to let users also seamlessly grant access to their address book or friends list--after all, so many sites today ask you to import your webmail address book to find connections and invite people to join. Technically this will be accomplished via a hybrid OpenID and OAuth protocol and Portable Contacts (Yahoo! today is using the "simple registration extension" to OpenID, which is ideal for transferring basic profile data, but insufficient for providing access to richer private data via APIs). We all made great progress on nailing down the details of this hybrid protocol while at IIW.

Given the excitement and eagerness of all the participants there, I think we can continue to expect more and more data to flow across the OpenID link, which will make it increasingly valuable for Relying Parties like Plaxo, and should incentivize many more sites to become RPs themselves. It's great to see this virtuous cycle in motion, and Plaxo is eager to work with any and all OpenID Providers who want to improve their UX and empower their users to use more of their data across the web!

PS: Here are some screen shots of 1) the "Sign in with your Yahoo! ID" option on Plaxo, 2) the consent page on Yahoo, where you can choose to also share your profile data, and 3) returning to Plaxo with a pre-filled registration page and no need to enter a Plaxo-specific password! Since this is a limited test, we're eager to hear your feedback both at Plaxo and Yahoo!, so if you haven't yet signed up for a Plaxo account, please give it a try and let us know what you think!

PPS: We also discussed this announcement in more detail on thesocialweb.tv -- check it out!

Another major victory for the Open Web: today Google has become an OpenID provider. This means you can now sign into sites like Plaxo with your existing Google Account, removing the need to remember separate passwords on each site you use. Obviously with a site as large and mainstream as Google supporting OpenID--in the company now of Yahoo, AOL, and (as of Monday) Microsoft--this will have a major impact on the web.

So starting today, you can now sign in to Plaxo (or sign up, if you're not yet a member) using your existing Google credentials. Just look for the "Sign in with a Google Account" link on our signin page.

This is also the foundation for secure data sharing between your Google account and the other services you use. In this first version, you can share your gmail e-mail address when you sign in to Plaxo. If you've already got that gmail address on your Plaxo account, we'll recognize you and sign you in automatically. And if you're signing up for a new Plaxo account, we'll pre-fill your gmail address in our registration, and we won't have to send you one of those e-mails asking you to confirm you really own it--since you already did by using OpenID! [Geek note: Google is using Attribute Exchange to send us the e-mail address, which I believe is one of the first mainstream uses of this OpenID extension!]

Going forward, we're hoping to see more data flow across that trusted link, including your address book and calendar (with your permission, of course). After all, that's what Plaxo's all about: keeping you connected by making the services you use work better together.

So go ahead and give it a try. You can also read Google's announcement. And Google's been doing a lot of research on how to improve the user experience for OpenID, so if you're interested in where this technology is headed, it's definitely worth checking out. John McCrea also provides some context on this announcement.

BTW, here's what you'll see before you sign into Plaxo using your Google account:

Good news for my fellow Netflix fans: you can now easily share your Netflix ratings as a feed in Pulse! As always, you can choose whether to share your ratings with your family, friends, business contacts, and/or within custom groups, and you'll start seeing ratings from people you know if they share them with you. Opinions on movies and TV shows are a common and natural starting point for discussions, so we expect to see long and heated comment threads starting from these shared reviews. And the best part is, it's so easy to rate movies as part of being a Netflix subscriber that you'll be able to start these discussions just by hooking up the tools you already use--no need to re-rate the movies in Plaxo or anywhere else, just connect your Netflix account. That's the power of giving users control over their data--everybody wins here. If you're a Netflix subscriber, go connect your Netflix account now!

Netflix rating shared inside my Pulse stream.

Not only am I excited about this integration because I love Netflix and love talking about movies with my friends, but I think it's a great example of how you can use Pulse to share non-public data with a trusted subset of the people you know. My ratings aren't public like a lot of web 2.0 content we aggregate--and I don't really want everyone in the world to see them--but I definitely want to share them with people I'm close to, whether or not they use Netflix themselves. Traditionally that's been hard to do, and if you think about it, there's a ton of interesting data about my life and what I'm up to that fits this pattern: what books I'm reading, where I'm traveling, what products I'm buying, and so on. Public data is really only the tip of the iceberg, but without a rich social graph and a set of protocols for sharing non-public data between trusted services, there's been no good way to share this data just with the people you want. But now that we have the right building blocks, and mainstream services are starting to use them, I expect a lot more of this type of rich, non-public sharing to start taking place.

Which brings me to the third reason I'm so excited about this integration--and the reason we were able to build and release it literally within a few weeks of Netflix releasing their API--Netflix chose to build it with existing, open standards. Specifically, they're using OAuth to let users grant Plaxo access to their non-public data, and they're using protected ATOM feeds for the ratings (along with RESTful APIs for getting additional data). Since Plaxo already knows how to crawl ATOM feeds, and we already know how to take users through the OAuth flow, it was trivial for us for hook this all up (most of the work was done in a single afternoon of hacking!). Better yet--using OAuth makes the experience of connecting Netflix and Plaxo much easier (and more secure) for users. You just click "Connect my Netflix account", sign into Netflix inside their popup if needed (Plaxo never sees your Netflix password), and grant Plaxo permission to access your private data. Then presto, you're all done. Nothing to type in, and no copying and pasting cryptic URLs like some services require as a hacky way of sharing non-public data. If you're one of those sites--please provide an OAuth interface, your users and partners will thank you! :)

Step 1: Click "Connect my Netflix account".

Step 2: Grant Plaxo access in the Netflix popup.

Step 3: You're connected! Choose whom to share your ratings with.

The Social Web is opening up, and services large and small are increasingly using a common set of open "building blocks" to integrate with the rest of the web. As many know, at Plaxo we think this is a great thing for users. for developers, and for our business. We've been early adopters and evangelists for several of these building blocks, including OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and microformats. And recently we've also helped lead the charge to build another key piece of the "open stack": a common API standard for accessing address book, profile, and friends-list data called "Portable Contacts".

Last week, MySpace hosted the first Portable Contacts Summit, where participants from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, Plaxo, JanRain, ShopIt, Skydeck, Chi.mp, and others came together to show off the work they'd done so far and discuss the remaining details to get to a final spec. I think it's fair to say that we were all blown away by how much progress we've made already, how energized all the players are to see this happen, and how close we are to seeing the vision of users empowered to take their profile and connections with them across the web becoming a reality.

In preparation for the Summit (and the Portable Contacts Hackathon hosted by SixApart the night before), fellow Plaxite Huy Nguyen and I built a full end-to-end Portable Contacts provider endpoint for Plaxo, as well as a vendor-neutral test harness that can show off the use of OAuth (including OAuth Discovery), XRDS-Simple, and Portable Contacts working together with any compliant service provider. We wanted to see if implementing the spec was really as easy as it should be, and also to provide some tools and examples to help jump start other implementations. It worked out great, and proved quite useful to others, so we decided to open it up for anyone that wants to jump in and start working on Portable Contacts themselves.

In fact, we've gone one step further. We've revamped Plaxo's developer section to focus primarily on the open building blocks we're using. Starting now, developers should consider OAuth and Portable Contacts the primary way to access profile, address book, and pulse connections data from Plaxo. The idea is simple: once you write code to work with Plaxo, you can use that exact same code on a variety of other sites. And if you've already integrated with one of those sites, you can start working with Plaxo right away. After all, one of the main drivers to create Portable Contacts was the pain developers face having to write custom, one-off API implementations against every site they deal with. So we think it's time to start living the good life, where common specs mean less writing code and more interoperability with more sites.

As the Portable Contact spec goes through its final tweaks, we'll keep our implementation up to date, and we'll cook up some more sample code, tutorials, and other things to help you work with these building blocks--on Plaxo, or any open site. We're not getting rid of our existing Plaxo-specific APIs (which also provide sync, calendar, and other functionality), so if you want to do a deeper integration specifically with Plaxo, let us know. But we think for most developers, working on the Open Stack will mean less time and effort to get up and running, and a better "bang for the buck". So if you're passionate about building services that live in the emerging Social Web ecosystem, we invite you to start playing with Portable Contacts on Plaxo, and as always, let us know what else we can do to help put users in control of their data!

--Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect

A new service called Gnip just launched that supplies a sorely needed piece of backend infrastructure for the burgeoning Social Web--making it quick and efficient for user-generated content created on a rapidly growing list of social sites (e.g. Digg or Flickr) to show up in tools like Plaxo Pulse that "aggregate" this data from across the web on behalf of users. Those familiar with Plaxo's eagerness to lead by example by integrating new technologies that help open up the Social Web ecosystem should not be surprised to learn that we’re a launch partner for Gnip, and have already integrated their infrastructure into Pulse.

Here's a bit of info on how Gnip works, why it's good for Plaxo users, and why it's good for the Social Web:

In a nutshell, Gnip acts as a middleman that notifies aggregators of social media, like Plaxo, when user-generated content sites, like Digg or Flickr, have new content they need to distribute. So, rather than us having to repeatedly ask our content site partners, "got anything new for any of our users? how about now? now?", Gnip notifies us when there’s new stuff from any of our members, so we can immediately pick up that content and show it to the people who are supposed to see it in Pulse.

For Plaxo users, the benefit is simple: when you digg a story or bookmark a link with del.icio.us, etc. you should see that activity show up in Pulse a lot quicker--often within 60 seconds, whereas before integrating with Gnip, it might have taken an hour or more. Starting today, Digg and del.icio.us should be very quick to update, with Flickr and Twitter hopefully following shortly. And any publisher can easily send data thru Gnip using their API, so if Pulse pulls feeds from your site and you'd like that content to show up faster, we’ll then make it happen!

For the technically inclined, here's what's happening behind the scenes:

Most of the content in Pulse comes from public RSS feeds for each user who's hooked up one more sites into their Pulse stream. We have background jobs that periodically poll each feed for each user for each service, and whenever we see anything new, we update that user's Pulse stream accordingly. Since we don't know in advance which users have new content at any given time, we have to keep polling each site for each user over and over again. If we want content to show up in Pulse more quickly, we have to poll the sites more frequently, and of course in any given minute, the vast majority of users haven't shared anything new right then, so the process is rather inefficient.

While providing individual RSS feeds for user activity on web 2.0 sites is nothing new, when we launched Pulse about a year ago, we were the first site to consume and aggregate these feeds en masse. Since we have such a large user base, and since polling is rather inefficient--particularly if you want to notice any updates quickly--Plaxo puts a rather large load on these sites, and in several cases even the larger sites have had to tell us to slow down so they can keep up with the demand. Since then, several new aggregator services have followed, including FriendFeed, SocialThing, and others, and as they gain popularity, they're further increasing the load on publisher sites.

Clearly this model will not continue to scale, and since the amount of social content being produced and consumed is rising every day, a better architecture is needed; one that efficiently routes updates from user generated content sites to social media aggregators, rather than the other way around. There are various technical ways to accomplish this today--posting updates directly to the aggregators, federated messaging protocols like xmpp (aka jabber), real-time public update streams, etc.--but few are widely deployed or easy to work with, which is why polling is still the dominant model used. Until now.

Gnip is stepping in to catalyze the shift from polling to pushing notifications by doing the hard work of consuming all the existing notification systems out there today (and polling itself, as needed) and pushing out the relevant updates to consumers like Plaxo and others. Pulse tells Gnip which users we want updates for (e.g. which Digg users have shared their public feed of dugg stories in Pulse), and whenever any of those users digg a new story, Gnip proactively notifies Plaxo, telling us which users have new activity, all within 60 seconds! Using Gnip, Plaxo no longer has to poll with high frequency to get quick updates--in fact, not only can we poll less frequently (which helps relieve the load on both Plaxo and the publishers we're currently hammering), but we get updates much faster than we could before. It's a classic example of a win-win created by reducing inefficiency in the system overall.

A quick note about standards: in the fully realized social web, there should be no need for single points of full centralization, either for Identity Providers, Social Graph Providers, or Content Aggregators. In each case, open standards will allow a decentralized and competitive "service layer" to emerge. For identity, OpenID is such a standard, and its adoption is continuing to spread rapidly. For "who you know" data, OAuth provides a standard way to securely share private data between trusted services, and efforts are underway to also standardize APIs for making address book and social graph data portable. As mentioned above, in the case of sharing and aggregating social web activity data, things are a bit more nascent. Standards like xmpp may someday gain wider adoption, but until then an opportunity exists to help realize that vision sooner.

Just as companies like Clickpass have stepped in to make OpenID more user-friendly and widespread, so too is Gnip stepping in to make scalable content sharing a reality sooner rather than later. In both cases, Plaxo is supporting these efforts because they provide useful value today, and they demonstrate the potential that truly opening up the social web provides, which we believe will bring about the future we all want even more rapidly. Today marks yet another acceleration of that progress, and we all know it won't be the last one!

--Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect

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... ;)

As a result of the recent announcement of our partnership with Comcast, a few of us made the trek to the granddaddy of cable shows - The Cable Show ’07 - to learn a little more about the industry we’re working with and to meet the players. It’s put on by NCTA, The National Cable & Telecommunications Association, which was founded in 1952. Ok, so Web 2.0 is the new kid on the block, and cable's been around the block, but who says they can't have fun together?

And where's the best place in the country to get together when you're getting together? Vegas, baby!

This year, the conference is hosted at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. The exhibit floor mirrors the tv guide – over here WealthTV with a red-hot Ferrari and a dapper Latin gentleman who has been rolling cigars for 36 years and who once was the fastest cigar roller in the world, individually hand wrapping cigars and expertly putting on the finishing touches for a line of attendees, sitting right across from EWTN (Eternal Word Television Network) Global Catholic Network whose booth has a dignified display of crosses and prayer cards and is open to all. Penthouse Media Group is just a few aisles away from Oxygen. Disney & ESPN, The Sportsman Channel, SiTV, Here! Networks, HSN, QVC, Fox Cable Networks, Hallmark, Discovery Channel, The Horse Racing Channel, The History Channel, The Fright Channel, Bloomberg Television, HBO, … I’m longing for my remote to help me move from booth to booth.

Changing channels, sprinkled amongst the 300+ exhibits are the technology, internet and mobile companies such as Motorola, Samsung, Sprint Nextel, Tivo, mobitv, Google, Cisco,... Internet and mobile have a small presence here and show the power of new distribution channels for content, and the market moving to triple and quad play offerings.

Not to be out done, TV shows its new technology too … Discovery Channel is showing a flyover of Machu Picchu in 3D HDTV on an enormous screen – looked like you were there – and I can say that because I was once, but that’s another story. Another booth had viewers mesmerized in front of the Panasonic 103” plasma tv. Most of the booths looked more like living rooms with comfy couches and coffee tables, so buyers could relax and get deals done.

Some of the characters step out of the tv to perform and later sign autographs and stand for pictures with attendees. The Fight Science dream team from National Geographic bashing stacks of cinder blocks with their foreheads drew hundreds of people - and shakes of the head from Silicon Valley-ites who earn their living by protecting theirs. Gospel Music Channel booth is playing soul-soaring music, and later American Idol Top 5 finalist George Huff will perform from his debut album. For the 15,000 attendees, there were opportunities to meet Dan Rather, Sponge Bob, the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, John Schneider (Dukes of Hazard, Smallville), and others …

Comcast has a large presence and was showcasing their content including Sprout, FEARnet, G4 (www.g4tv.com), Golf Channel, E!, TVOne, and ExerciseTV with Jake of Body by Jake signing his book "I've Seen a Lot of Famous People Naked, and They've Got Nothing on You!" (which you might not guess is a book of Jake's business secrets for entrepreneurs.)

And talk about the bandwidth of cable, I saw all of that in about 2 hours on the exhibit floor - who knows what I missed the other 10+ hours it was open - they kept the events and celebrities coming!

We’re already having fun working with Comcast! And if you're a current Comcast and Plaxo subscriber, you already know what we've got on the way. (link back to other blog post) If not, stay tuned for the results of the partnership!

The founders of fleck.com--and organizers of The Next Web conference--were visiting Silicon Valley from Amsterdam, Nederlands. They camped out at Plaxo for an afternoon and a fun time was had by all.

Pictured: Arjen Schat (fleck), Joseph Smarr (plaxo), Patrick de Laive (fleck), me/Rikk Carey (plaxo), and Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten (fleck).

The white suits are the fleck.com trademark. Fleck.com enables people to annotate any web page and share it with others. So, when they unveiled their first product, they attended a TechCrunch party hosted by Michael Arrington, and wore the white suits so that everyone at the party could annotate them!

Today is a big day for us at Plaxo, as our partnership with Comcast was just announced. Plaxo will be part of Comcast’s Smartzone™, which aims to provide Comcast Triple Play customers with one central location to send and receive email and instant messages, check voicemail online, etc.

(The beta/soft launch for our work together started a few weeks back. If you’re currently a Comcast Broadband Customer and a Plaxo Member, you can sign up now by clicking here. )

We’re obviously thrilled to be working with Comcast, which is the nation’s leading MSO, with over 24.2 million cable customers, 12.1 million high-speed Internet customers, and 3.0 million voice customers. This should have significant implication's for Plaxo's growth curve.

We’re also thrilled, because our partnership is great example of the power of a smart, networked address book. Todd and Cam started Plaxo to help people access their contacts (as well as calendars, notes, tasks, etc.) from a wide variety of different sources and tools. (E.g. Outlook, Yahoo!, Google, AIM, mobile phones, etc.) Along the way, we’ve discovered that the networked address book is also an incredibly important piece of foundation on which to build innovative consumer services. By being part of the SmartZone unified communications center, for example, we can make it easier for people to communicate with friends, families, and customers, whether they are at home using the fantastic array of Comcast communications services (such as e-mail, digital voice, video IM,etc.), or at work using Outlook, on the road, at an internet café, on their mobile, etc. What Comcast is doing in integrating a smart address book into all their services will make their services more interesting and valuable to users, and will serve as a model for many other service providers in making so called “triple-play” services truly integrated.

At its heart, the address book is really the list of the people that you know, care about, and interact with. The calendar is the representation of what you’ve done, what you’re doing, and what you plan to do. Done right, the smart, networked address book and calendar should be able to form the foundation for vastly improved communications, content, and community functions.

At Plaxo, we’ve spent a lot of time doing the un-sexy work necessary to make address books and calendars worthy of being that foundation (e.g. putting them in the network, making them sync everywhere, making them fuller and more accurate, building out APIs, working on security, performance, and availability, etc.) Now, after several years, it is really gratifying to see forward-thinking companies like Comcast start to build exciting solutions leveraging the smart, networked address book.

We’ve announced a few similar partnerships in the past, including AOL and Openwave, and we are starting to work with a wide variety of other service providers, social networks, device manufacturer, etc. I think the industry is waking up to the power of smart, networked address books. The next few years should be fun!

Ben Golub
CEO

P.S. Here's thoughtful commentary on the announcement by Om Malik.

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

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!

Of course, the big buzz at this year's CES was all about the other announcement, which I'm sure was galling to the organizers and to Bill Gates, who may be a lot richer, but will never be as “cool” as Mr. Jobs.

The big thing that struck me was not so much the endless big screen TVs, although they certainly made them loud enough. Nor the autograph signings by Hulk Hogan at one of the booths, although there was a loooooong line of people waiting for them!

The theme of this year's show seemed to be about integration and synchronization: helping people deal with an ever-growing list of devices in their homes, cars, offices, and now on their bodies, by making their music, video, and personal information accessible everywhere. tying your video, audio, computer, phone, and everything else together and keeping them all in sync. Moxi had a cool app to enable a next gen DVR, where you can schedule recordings over the Internet on your calendar. Vtech had some very cool cordless phones that allow you to access your address book on your cordless phone.

Let's hope this push towards more integration works. We all have way too many devices, and every day add a new one. If they all worked together, that'd be a good thing all around.

--Swami

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

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

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

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

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

--Joseph Smarr, Architect / maker of widgets

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

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

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

--Joseph Smarr

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

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

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

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

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

--Joseph Smarr

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

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

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

Here's the description of the talk:

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

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

Answer: HipCal (www.hipcal.com).

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

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

Plaxo has a calendar?

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

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

Exploding calendars

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

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

Anyway, back to the story...

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

Garret Heaton

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

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

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

That was easy, now for the hard part

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

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

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

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

More photos of the HipCal guys

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

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

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

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

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

• Om Malik
• Techcrunch
• Red Herring

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

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

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

-- Mark Jen, Product Manager

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

A few of us from Plaxo made the trip to CTIA Wireless 2006 ® in Las Vegas last week. We joined 40,000 other attendees from over 90 countries in oohing and aahing over the latest wireless phones, services, and applications that will be available in America over the next 3-4 months. (Some of our team also got to go to the granddaddy wireless show in Europe, 3GSM, a couple of months ago.) At CTIA, there were over 900 exhibitors and we didn’t even come close to seeing them all.

The phone manufacturers’ booths (Motorola, Nokia, LG, Samsung to name a few) were packed with new phones and people wanting to see them. There were phones that reminded me of kids’ transformers – depending on which way you opened them up, it could be a phone, camera or video camera. Phones showing live tv whose screens turned vertically or horizontally depending on how you preferred to watch the show – with no interruption as you turned the screen! Phones with Zeiss optics for the cameras, the first 10Mpixel camera in a phone, a phone with a Flash-based UI, high quality music players and streaming video on others, a phone with a built-in 4GB harddrive or of removable memory (you can store a lot of music and images in 4GB!), phones with wifi, phones running linux, more phones with push-to-talk and bluetooth…phones for kids, phones for seniors, … Now all I need is a phone to do my laundry. If you need more details on the new phones at CTIA, visit the experts at www.PhoneScoop.com.

Now that phones can deliver and display rich media, the phone is a platform for entertainment and personalization - attracting companies such as MTV, Disney, ESPN, HBO, AOL, as well as game developers to the show. We talked to application vendors about surround sound (yes, on the phone!), location-based technology (maps and directions), haptic technology (the phone rumbles as you play a game), cartoons and games, ringtones and mp3 players, streaming video and live tv, controlling your tivo from your phone, and speech recognition.

Also fun was the wireless fashion show which had young designers competing for the top prize in innovation with wireless technology – everything from a baseball jacket with an led billboard which scrolled “CTIA Wireless” (image the lights of Vegas on legs), a purse used as a signaling device (to catch a cab, let the waiter know you’re ready to order or catch the attention of your SO) to clothing which emitted aromatherapy if it sensed the wearer was stressed.

CTIA announced that 25.7 million new wireless subscribers were added in America in calendar 2005 bringing the total number of estimated wireless customers in the US to 207.9 million. Wow. That’s a lot of you trying to make calls, send SMS, share photos and ringtones, and send emails from the phone. So we’re thinking, what can Plaxo do to help you out? If you’ve got a mobile phone and you’re a Plaxo member, we’d love to hear what you want from Plaxo while you’re on the go. Let us know on the Plaxo Community Forums or by commenting on this post!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

In case you haven’t heard yet, the new Plaxo-enabled version of AIM (called “Triton”) has now been officially released to the public. Thanks to everyone that participated in the beta program. We encourage everyone to download Triton and let us know what you think!

The Triton release is a really big deal for Plaxo. It’s by far the largest and deepest partner-integration we’ve ever done, and it’s going to result in (among other things) a big increase in the number of Plaxo members. This is great news for everyone that uses Plaxo, because it means you’ll be able to automatically stay in touch with more and more of your friends and colleagues. To make it even easier, you can now get connected with fellow Plaxo members in your address book if you know their e-mail address or AIM Screen Name (previously you could only get connected by e-mail address). So there will be more people to connect with, more ways to get connected, and more places where your contact information follows you around and is always up-to-date.

Plaxo-enabling AIM is also a great step forward in our goal of giving users access to their data in whatever application they use. Just like our IE toolbar and Thunderbird toolbar, the new AIM provides another group of users with the ability to build and maintain a universal address book where they need it most, and it extends the reach and value of everyone that uses Plaxo as part of another app. And just like with all our toolbars, users of the new AIM also get web access to their contacts via Plaxo Online, so you can always look up someone’s info while you’re on the go.

Here are some of the features you’ll notice when you download Triton:

• Triton setup wizard. You can create work and home cards to share with your contacts (including our new, more powerful sharing options), build a universal address book by importing your existing contacts from Outlook, Outlook Express, Hotmail, and Yahoo!, and build your Buddy List by finding all your contacts that have an AIM Screen Name. If you’re already a Plaxo member, you can just attach Triton to your existing account, and it will sync your Plaxo address book with Triton.
• Build your Buddy List. This is a really useful feature, especially for people that maintain an address book outside of AIM. Plaxo will look at all the contacts in your address book that have Screen Names (either that you’ve entered or that you’ve received from fellow Plaxo members) and we’ll also look up all AIM members whose Screen Name is linked to an e-mail in your address book. You’ll be surprised how many people you know are on AIM but that you didn’t have in your Buddy List! You can then choose which of those contacts you want to add to your AIM Buddy List. If you’re an existing Plaxo member, you can still run the build Buddy List wizard by launching it from the Edit menu (after you’ve successfully synced your address book the first time).
• Integrated Triton UI. Once you get up and running with Triton, you’ll notice that in addition to your Buddy List, you also have an “Addresses” tab that reveals your Plaxo-enabled address book. Here you can look up extra contact info for your buddies and even choose what info you want to share with them. You’ll also notice the familiar Plaxo icons in the address list for contacts that are also using Plaxo or that you’ve sent an update request to. You can also edit your Plaxo cards from within Triton by going to Edit → Edit My Contact Info.
• AIM enhancements for Outlook. In addition to the new AIM itself, Triton comes with an optional update to the Plaxo Toolbar for Outlook and Outlook Express. In addition to keeping your Outlook and AIM address books in sync, the primary benefit you’ll notice is AIM presence inside Outlook. Click on the AIM status icon next to the From: in any e-mail you receive and you can IM the person, look up their contact info, and more.
• AIM enhancements for Plaxo Online. We’ve also added several AIM-friendly features to our online address book. First off, you can now sign in using your AIM Screen Name, as well as any of your e-mail addresses. Of course, you first have to add your Screen Name to your Plaxo cards (for Triton users, this should happen automatically).
• AIM Mail and AOL Mail. AIM Mail is the new free e-mail service available to all AIM users. When you link you Plaxo account to Triton you Plaxo address book is synced with your AIM Mail or AOL Mail address book. If you use Plaxo with Outlook, Outlook Express, or Thunderbird changes you make in those address books and synced with your AIM mail or AOL mail address book; one Universal Address Book!

We hope everyone will find the Plaxo integration in the new AIM to be useful and fun. As you'll see, Triton greatly expands the number of ways you can stay in contact with your friends and colleagues (im, email, voice, video, etc.) and Plaxo provides you with the contact info you need to take advantage of these new features.

As usual, send us feedback and stay tuned for more to come!

Thanks,
The Plaxo Team

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

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

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

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

Thanks,
The Plaxo Team