Last month we added one of the key features that had been missing from our spin on social networking, the ability to search for people. We want to make Pulse a comfortable and enjoyable experience for mainstream users around the world. So, out of respect for user privacy, we decided to make the directory 100% opt in. The only profiles in our directory are from members who explicitly opted to be included in the directory.

Now that over a million of our members have opted-in, we’re now ready to open the doors on the directory. It’s available at www.plaxo.com/directory. Over time, the directory will keep getting better, as more of our 20 million (and rapidly growing) member base opts-in. We're initially launching in English, with more languages to come.

As the directory will be indexed by Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines, we chose to make your default public profile page fairly minimal. You can customize your public profile page to show any and all (or none) of your Plaxo profile. For example, you can choose whether to show your educational history, your professional history, or your interests. You can also create an easy-to-remember URL that you can print on your business card, like hongkwon.myplaxo.com (it's printed on mine). To get started, go to your public profile settings page.

Of course, if you change your mind and decide not to be listed, opting out is as simple as going to your settings and turning off People Search.

Hong Kwon
Product Manager

At this week's Internet Identity Workshop, all the pieces finally came together. We now have the tools we need as a community to really make friends-list portability work--a way to give users back the control and power they deserve to take their local piece of the social graph with them wherever they go. And most importantly, a way to do this all securely, with respect and control for privacy and also the ability to find people that want to be found. There's no more need to wait. Game on.

The three missing pieces that came together at IIW were OpenID (version 2.0 is now final), OAuth (version 1.0 is now final), and clarity on the roles and responsibilities of users, social networks, and social applications in an open social web. IIW brings together an incredible community of people, and it's a major accomplishment for the web that all these technologies are now ready for prime-time.

I hosted a session at IIW in which I sketched a vision for how these pieces could come together to enable practical friends-list portability, and everyone was enthusiastic and supportive. And this included people from Google, Yahoo, AOL, JanRain, claimID, and members of the grass-roots community. In fact, I couldn't get anyone to pick a fight with me over any of technical or privacy details, and this is a group that prides itself on picking fights over technical and privacy details! So I think we're on to something big.

Here are the slides from my session (PPT, 408K), as well as detailed session notes from Chris Messina. If anyone has any further or feedback, please leave a comment here. Several people have also asked how they can help move this project forward more quickly. I think the next step is basically to do some strawman implementations of the various specs and glue code, and then to try and get it built into social networks and applications that "get it". Let me know if you'd like to get involved in this community effort to open up the social web (this complements ongoing work from fellow Open Social Web trailblazers like Brad Fitzpatrick, David Recordon, Tantek Çelik, and others).

And as far as Plaxo goes, the fact that these technologies now have final specs and the IIW community has blessed the vision for friends-list portability, you can expect us to step on the gas here in a big way. This is what Plaxo does best: we help you get your data out of sites and services that don't otherwise make it easy, and we make it work for you everywhere you go. There are a lot of sites that know who-you-know and a lot of social applications where you want to find people you already know. These open standards provide the foundation for solving this current inefficiency, and Plaxo is going to help put the solution in the hands of millions of users, sooner not later. This will be a major focus for us in 2008, and you should expect to see a lot more happening here very soon. It's going to be a good year for the Social Web!

--Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect

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

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

Ever since I started working on the "open social web", I’ve wanted to co-author some kind of crisp and clean manifesto or "bill of rights" to explain to all the social sites what their users will increasingly ask of them, and what specifically these sites can do to "be open". While there's plenty of room for discussion about various implementation details, it's become increasingly clear to me that if sites just do a few things right for their users in terms of openness--both technically and by having the right spirit--the rest can be layered and tweaked and otherwise made to "just work" for users.

Last week, I met with Marc Canter, and we found that our notions for how the open social web should come about were very much aligned. Over the course of several hours, we developed a lengthy, bulleted list of thoughts, philosophies, and pragmatic approaches. As we reviewed that outline, a set of core ideas stood out to us, which we could succinctly frame as a "Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web." In the following days, we circulated a draft with a number of thought leaders in the community, and were pleased to have Robert Scoble and Michael Arrington offer their support and sign-on as co-authors of the document.

That Bill of Rights has now just been published at http://OpenSocialWeb.org. The document lays out the basic rights that users should demand from any social site they use, with respect to ownership, control, and freedom of movement of their personal information. It also describes four things that sites need to do if they want to be truly supportive of those fundamental rights.

I realize that not every company that operates a socially-enabled web app will readily agree with the ideas put forth in this Bill of Rights. Handing over ownership and control to the users might even seem crazy to some. But from our own experience at Plaxo, as the custodian of millions of our users's personal address books, such user-centric policies are good for business as well as good for users. For years, Plaxo's privacy policy has included these core principles:

• Your Information is your own and you decide who will have access to it.
• You maintain ownership rights to Your Information, even if there is a business transition or policy change.
• You may add, delete, or modify Your Information at any time.

And to be clear, "open" doesn't necessarily mean "public". Plaxo users generally consider their address book data to be extremely private, but they still want the ability to get it in and out of the trusted tools and sites they use (such as Outlook, Mac address book, Yahoo!, etc.). And "open" also doesn't mean "less control over who can see what"--each site will decide what user experience works best for their users. What matters is that whatever data your users can see, they should also be able to syndicate and use with other services they trust.

We think it’s time for socially-enabled web sites to stop competing over who can build a higher wall to trap their users' data. Instead, we are actively working to make sure that the "social web" is as open and vibrant as the Internet itself. We also firmly believe that the space of social apps is not a zero-sum game--as it becomes easier to find out what other sites your friends are using and to consume that content in novel ways, everyone will end up with more traffic and more satisfied users. We've already seen a bit of this with Plaxo Pulse users discovering and using new social sites by seeing what else the people they know are creating online, but the impact will be far larger when it's distributed across the entire web.

Lastly, this Bill of Rights is part of a larger conversation that has been going on for some time and with many important voices. It echoes earlier work like DigitalConsumer.org's Bill of Rights, follows earlier work in open data portability within the FOAF and microformats communities, and more recently, builds upon the conversations I've had with people like Brad Fitzpatrick, Tantek Çelik, Chris Messina, Dick Hardt, and others about practical ways to bootstrap the solution we all want. I hope the conversation continues to grow, and I hope this helps both sites and their users clarify how they want the social web to work, so that they can collectively make it so.

Thanks to everyone that came to Lunch 2.0 last week at Plaxo! Over 300 of you showed up to eat, drink, converse, and check your pulse. A bunch of people grabbed plaxo pulse t-shirts, and we even saw people wearing them at BarCampBlock this weekend. Best of all, everyone was enthusiastic about opening up the social web and putting users back in control of who they know.

There are already some great write-ups posted by Jeremiah Owyang, John McCrea, and others, and of course there are lots of photos to browse. A big thanks to everyone at Plaxo who worked so hard to make this event great, and thanks to everyone in the Lunch 2.0 community for joining us and eating our lunch! :)

It’s very exciting to see Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordon’s thoughts on the Social Graph make it into the public discourse. I’ve been talking off and on with them about the open social web for most of the year, and it’s impressive to see how quickly things are materializing. It also echoes the growing desire that both users and developers have for freeing their data from walled gardens and putting users back in control of who they know. This is something we’re actively working on at Plaxo, and there’s still a lot more to do!

First of all, we agree emphatically with several of the points Brad and David make:

• Users are frustrated that they have to re-build their friends list on every new site they go to, and this also impedes the development of new socially-enabled applications.


• The answer is NOT to have one company own the social graph and require all apps to be re-built on top of a proprietary platform in order to gain access to it.


• We have to help users regain control now, and we can’t assume that all social sites will be cooperative (at least right away), nor can we wait for everyone to agree on a single interop spec.


• Users care about enhanced functionality and convenience being delivered, not about any particular standards or data formats (per se).


• Users won’t generally want all the same friends on all the sites they use, but they do want to know when anyone they know on a given site is also using other sites they also use. In other words, the goal is to aggregate who you know across all the sites you use and then let you choose who to connect to where in what capacity.

Looking at things through the lens of Plaxo, which helps 15+ million people around the world keep track of who they know by syncing their existing address books across the many tools they use, there are also a few additional points we think are important to make:

• While having an open-source, non-profit entity collecting and serving the entire social graph may be better than a single proprietary company or a mess of disconnected companies, we think the ultimate solution has to be that each user owns and controls their own profile and list of friends. Different people will trust different companies to act on their behalf as stewards of their online identity and relationships, but no single entity should ever have to be the gatekeeper for the entire world.


• Our users tell us that the contents of their address book are private and that preserving their privacy is very important. So while some users are happy to declare their list of friends in an open and public way, we feel that dealing with private data is essential, and certainly much more than “10% of the problem”. I think there are ways to separate the details of authentication from the exchange of info, but it’s worth noting that wanting your data to be portable doesn’t mean you want (or need) it to be public—it is sufficient that you can move your data between two trusted parties without those parties needing to agree explicitly a priori to inter-operate.


• Linking and crawling the graph of URLs that describe your profile on different sites to aggregate your profile and friends lists is a great idea (and one we intend to support in Plaxo Pulse). But for many users, e-mail addresses in address books is still the de facto standard for representing their relationships, and we believe supporting linking by e-mail address in the open social web will still be important for the foreseeable future. These are complementary techniques of course, and they can be partially unified by using mbox_sha1sum and similar tricks, but the basic process that most social networks use today of “give me your e-mail address book, and I’ll tell you who you know on this site based on their e-mail address” should not be overlooked. Sites will differ on how much access they give you to other users’ e-mail addresses, but I think there are ways to make it work that may actually be simpler than assuming that profile URLs are the main identifiers to deal with.

These are exciting times and I’m thrilled to see so many people getting involved in these important discussions. You can count on Plaxo to stay involved, both in the discussion and as a service that will support emerging open standards and best practices for keeping users in control. It’s hard to say yet how this will all turn out, but it’s great to see the momentum building for the opening up of the social web.

It's hard to believe it's been over a year since we last had a Lunch 2.0 at Plaxo! After all, three of the four founders are current or former Plaxites! (read: a bunch of us liked getting free food at other companies, heh.) And so much has happened since then: we released an all-new Plaxo, we moved to a new building, and we built a new social web app. So it's high-time we had everyone back over to celebrate with us!

You can get all the details at lunch 2.0 and then RSVP on upcoming. You'll have the run of the office, the food will be yummy, and you'll get to hang out with a bunch of fellow tech and food enthusiasts. See you there!

--Joseph Smarr, open lunch hacker

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... ;)

All Plaxo members have at least one thing in common: we care a great deal about our contacts and our address book. It's our lifeline, a direct representation of the relationships (both business and personal) that we have put years of time and effort into.

Yesterday, we launched our Automated Backup and Recovery feature. It creates automatic backups of your Address Book data and let's you restore your Address Book in the event disaster strikes.

Lost your laptop? Hard Drive died? Maybe you accidentally deleted all your contacts; Backup and Recovery will help you restore your address book to various points in time up to 90 days back.

This has been something a lot of our users have been requesting for our Premium Suite (other popular requests include Gmail, and Google Calendar sync, both of which are currently in Beta).

If you are a Premium member, Automated Backup has already been turned on for you. If you don't have it yet, don't wait till it's too late, sign up here.

-- Tawheed, Product Manager

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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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

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

--Joseph Smarr, Architect and Haxo enthusiast

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

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

Happy WAPping!

-- Mark Jen
Product Line Manager

Late last year we were told that our current collocation facility was unable to provide us with additional resources (power/cooling). So, we decided at that point to begin looking for a new location to host the Plaxo application. This was a large undertaking for the Operations team and required concise timing, and a thorough understanding of how each of the components that make up the Plaxo back-end would respond.

After nearly 4 months of searching for a new location, negotiating details of the contract, procuring new hardware (racks/power management/etc…), securing a solid data migration specialist, and painstaking selection of what systems would be moved when, we were ready to start phase 1 of 2.

Then an interesting issue came up, we were moving some database servers, web servers, various others, but how would they communicate on the back-end with the other existing infrastructure? Well, Layer42 (one of our NSPs) came to the rescue, and was able to provide us with an amazing service, proving their excellent flexibility, and commitment to the customer. They set us up with a literal cross connect between the facilities, even setup some VLANs on this link, allowing those now moved systems to communicate across this link as if they were still on the same LAN. Sweet.

Plaxo designed our back-end infrastructure to not only scale horizontally, but to always have online replicas of critical data, ensuring that those replicas were physically separate systems. This early decision enabled us to move approximately 50% of the site (100+ systems) while the customer never noticed we were in a degraded state. After the first move was successfully completed, we migrated all the database services and caching service from the old location to the new location by simply promoting the secondary copy of each database to be the primary, and vice versa. This was done over 2 weeks, and laid the groundwork for phase 2.

Well, phase 2 was recently completed, and I’m pleased to say it went quite well. Not a single support request asking why the site was offline, or why their data was unavailable.

-- Ethan Erchinger
Operations Manager

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- Regina Bustamante
Director, Globalization

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 great idea emerged a few weeks back over at another startup, meebo. We thought it was so good that we readily jumped on board. The concept: With the big game approaching, why not make our own commercials, but instead of shelling out the big bucks for tv time, just post them on YouTube? Folks at other startups felt the same, and the list of participating companies kept growing. By yesterday, a total of six companies each had managed to shoot and edit a short video piece they were ready to share with the world.

I’m really pleased with how ours turned out. It’s great to see what a few volunteers were able to do with a tiny budget (fifty bucks) and only a few days for production. Without further ado, I am pleased to present our first ever “tv” commercial, “One Beer.”

If you dig it, please Digg it.

(Oh, yeah, and that is a new Plaxo logo and tagline at the end of our piece. A sneak peek of things to come.)

Also, please check out the great efforts from the other five companies: meebo, Meez, Multiply, RockYou.com, and Technorati. Some really great stuff!

meebo

Meez

Multiply

RockYou.com

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.

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

Signs of the times: Stock markets hitting all-time highs. Pre-profit Silicon Valley startups selling for more than a billion dollars. And entrepreneurs being treated like rock stars!

Literally.

Yep. The latest issue of Rolling Stone just hit the stands, and our very own Todd Masonis is featured prominently in an article entitled "The Baby Billionaires of Silicon Valley." You'll have to run down to your local newstand to see the full article, but here's a link to a preview on the magazine's website.

During our recent Haxo day I decided to help one of our less productive employees contribute more to the company. For the past few months we’ve had a Nabaztag keeping us company by our desks. He’s a little plastic rabbit who connects to wifi and can be configured from the web. It can check your email, tell you the weather, let you know how the stock market is doing, and even practice Tai Chi. We thought it’d be really cool to have him read out Plaxo statistics every day, especially since we knew the 15 million member milestone was approaching quickly. Luckily for us, this guy has an open API you can use to send him text to read and directions to position his ears.

After only a week of practice he announced that we’d reached 15 million members. Swoot! In celebration, and since we enjoy the sound of his voice so much, we thought it’d be fun to let you send him messages too. We welcome compliments as well as criticisms.

So go ahead, send us a message!

Update: Thanks to everyone that sent us a message so far! By now, everyone in the office knows all-too-well the Nabaztag's "I'm about to announce a message" melody! :) Keep 'em coming. Here's a selection of the messages we've received so far:

• Hooray for over-priced wifi-enabled geek toys.


• Get back to work and stop messing around. You've got 15 mill subscribers to support.


• Do you really hear this in your actual office?


• Mark Foley was framed!


• I wonder how long before you turn this off .....


• thanks for the great product (ical/vcal support please)


• So what's the ratio of plaxo spam emails sent out to number of users?


• You should write a Plaxo calendar module for Google home pages.


• Hey guys, You rock, Congratulations


• Who's in the office so late? ;) Thank Mark Jen for this!


• Congrats Plaxo, it is nice to see you grow.


• Please tell your users how the Hip Cal integration is going!

But our favorite message so far came from the Nabaztag creators themselves (I wonder how they found out):

Hello, it's Marvel in Paris from Violet, we wanted to congratulate you on your achievements. What is Plaxo exactly about ? Did you look out the window of your office today ? By the way what is the name of your Nabaztag ? Take good care of each of you. Aurevoir !

In response, Plaxo is a "smart address book" (learn more), yes we did look out the window today, and our Nabaztag's name is jsmarr. Thanks for asking, and thanks for making such a cool and lovable gadget!!

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

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

--Joseph Smarr

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

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

--Joseph Smarr

By now we all know that the U.S. ranking in Plaxo’s Connected Index was even worse than our showing in the World Cup. In fact we lag behind countries with weaker internet infrastructure and penetration. Some of you may be surprised, but I’m not.

That some cultures value social connectedness more than others is not a new idea and has been widely written about. The claim is that cultures fall into two categories.

● Independent cultures: Those that follow a more independent cultural norm, where members value independence above social relationships,
● Collectivist cultures: Those obeying a collectivist cultural norm, in which people exhibit a more interdependent mode of existence.

Anglo Saxon countries (therefore us) are said to belong to the former group, while Asian and Latin cultures belong to the latter.

These “Cultures of Connectedness” (my term) rely on many layers of social relationships where business, family, friends and social contacts are equally important. The term guanxi, here in Romanized form, attempts to describe the importance of social networks in the Chinese culture, which is definitely a culture of connectedness. But beyond the practical benefits that strong social networks may provide, in cultures of connectedness people just like…being connected.
This is highlighted in a recent blog post on the Connected Index describing the experience of a U.S. immigrant in Argentina who feels very much….connected.

So it’s no wonder several of these countries appear at the top of our Index, including the administrative region of Hong Kong, whose Connected Index is second only to Argentina with an average of 390 contacts per address book. It’s easy to see why: Hong Kong has guanxi, strong internet penetration and a high level of comfort with English -- about 1/3 of the population is fluent in English and 2/3 understands it. But in many of the other countries in our top 20 people are not as comfortable with an English UI and internet penetration, while growing, still has a long way to go to reach U.S levels. The one thing these people have in common is the importance of feeling connected.

I agree with John that the real measure of connectedness is not one’s six-degrees-of-separation network or the quality of one’s broadband connection, but the size of one’s address book. Those are the people we have direct access to, not through friends or friends of friends. If that’s true then we can extrapolate the Connected Index to measure individual levels of connectedness, which I did by comparing my own address book to the Index. I’m sad to report that my numbers are even lower than the national average. My immediate reaction was to mentally go through the list of people I have met recently looking for possible contacts to add. I guess this not only shows I’m unconnected but definitely competitive!

What about you? How connected are you?

-Regina Bustamante, Director, Globalization

So much of the value created in Silicon Valley is in the ethereal realm of ideas: algorithms, applications, websites, and all manner of “intellectual property”. At times, it seems that the physical world is of little consequence; that imagination, ingenuity, caffeine-fueled keyboarding (and a fair bit of luck) are all that matter here. Indeed, when you look at most high tech companies, very little of their value is found in physical assets. What really matters is the people working there and what is in their heads.

So, it always comes as a surprise to me whenever the physical world asserts itself back into the Silicon Valley equation, as it has begun to once again, some six years after the Web 1.0 Bubble burst, taking with it the local commercial real estate market. Though many gleaming glass structures remain empty, for those within scooter distance of the Googleplex, things are feeling a bit frothy. To accommodate its continued growth, Google is buying up every decent property in its neighborhood (even including the building that we are in).

View from Plaxo: Some Valuable Silicon Valley Dirt

So, this post is to the forgotten part of Silicon Valley, the dirt beneath our feet. It keeps changing hands, as wave after wave of innovation sees the rise of one type of company – and the fall of another. When people visit or drive past Google today, I imagine that most assume the colorful, playful buildings were designed specifically for Larry, Sergey, and the other Googlenauts. But those who’ve been around for a while know that complex was built in a different time, for a different “hottest company in the Valley” – for Silicon Graphics in the heyday of the workstation market (in the early ‘90’s).

It will be interesting to watch the continued transformation around us. What I know for sure is that the amount of land is finite, and that the competition of ideas played out upon its surface is in a constant state of change.

-John McCrea, VP of Marketing

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