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

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.

There’s been an interesting story making the rounds of the blogosphere this weekend, claiming that Plaxo is about to be acquired by Xing for $250M. The gist of the story is that this is part of Xing’s efforts to enter the US market, where Xing faces stiff competition from LinkedIn. The rumor first appeared in Techcrunch, and was soon picked up by CNET and GigaOM.

Of course, denying rumors usually just fans the flames of speculation—but for what it’s worth, this one isn’t true. Plaxo isn’t currently “in play.” We’re heads-down, working on an all-new Plaxo, as well as delivering on our partnerships, such as the one that we recently announced with Comcast.

It’s fun to try to figure out where these rumors come from. At various points in time over the past several months, I have had lunch with Lars Hinrichs (CEO of Xing) and with Reid Hoffman (Chairman of LinkedIn). But, we did not talk about acquisition. And, my lunch on Friday was one of the 3-for-a-dollar ramen soups we stock in the Plaxo snack room. ;^)

Ben Golub
CEO

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

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.

I just got back from being on a panel at Supernova entitled, “The Personal Infosphere.” The panel was moderated by Jeff Clavier, (SoftTech VC), and included Dalton Caldwell (imeem), Yael Elish (eSnips), Hans Peter Brondmo (Plum), and Tariq Krim (Netvibes).

The format included ~6 minutes of introductions/product demos, and then we dove deep into the discussion. Since most of the other panelists run businesses driven by user creation of rich media and the associated broad sharing and categorization of that media, we had some interesting debates related to:

• The relative value of social filtering (e.g. recommendations from people you know) vs. more collaborative filtering (i.e. relying on the wisdom of crowds to derive implicit recommendations/rankings)
• The ways in which the relatively unstructured modes of communication and sharing popular in consumer applications can get translated into a more structured enterprise environment
• Privacy and copyright issues
• Whether a lot of these sites are just creating new information silos, rather than promoting broad sharing and discoverability

All in all, a very interesting panel, although we studiously avoided any discussion of such mundane matters as business models or the applicability of some of these services in the broader marketplace. Plaxo was somewhat of an outlier in terms of the nature of the content we provide, maturity of the company and business model, users base, etc.

Dan Farber just posted an interesting write up of the panel.
Were you at the panel? Any thoughts?

Also, just a reminder that our own John McCrea will be on a panel at Supernova on Friday called Who Owns "You"?.

Bambi Francisco from Marketwatch sent a quick note letting us know that she posted a video segment on Plaxo to her blog. This piece was filmed about two years ago when we were searching for a CEO and originally aired on CBS. In start-up time it feels like forever-ago, but should give an inside glimpse in to what it took to find Ben.

You can find the video here (2nd story down)

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

So, here are some quick answers to the following :

1. Why does this make sense for Plaxo Users?


2. Why does this make business sense for Plaxo?


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

HipCal gives us:

• More reasons for people to join Plaxo


• More reasons for current users to stay active


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


• More opportunities to launch new premium services

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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

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

For more on what people are saying, see:

Our press release
Internet News
The Daily Om
Red Herring
Techcrunch

Answer: HipCal (www.hipcal.com).

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

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

Plaxo has a calendar?

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

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

Exploding calendars

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

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

Anyway, back to the story...

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

Garret Heaton

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

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

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

That was easy, now for the hard part

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

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

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

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

More photos of the HipCal guys

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

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

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

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

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

• Om Malik
• Techcrunch
• Red Herring

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stacy Martin
Plaxo Privacy Officer
privacy @t plaxo.com

A member asked me today, "Is AOL buying Plaxo?"

He had read the press release about how Plaxo and America Online have formed an agreement to help AOL members and AIM users to better manage contact information. He had also read AOL's Release of the Preview Edition of New AIM Triton Software that features a Plaxo-enabled AIM Address Book.

My answer to him was, No - these announcements do not mean AOL is purchasing Plaxo. They simply mean that Plaxo is powering and enabling the AIM Address book with the AIM Triton release, which in itself is very exciting news. More information on the Plaxo/AOL agreement is available on our web site.

Certainly I can't speak to the future, but the question also reminded me of what would happen if a business transition did occur for Plaxo. What would happen to a Plaxo member's information? Fortunately, we detail this in our Plaxo Privacy Policy, under the "Change of Ownership or Other Business Transition" section:

In the event Plaxo goes through a business transition, such as a merger, acquisition or the sale of all or substantially all of its assets (a ?Business Transition?), your membership in the Plaxo Network? and the Plaxo servers containing Your Information will, in most instances, be part of the assets transferred. In such event, you will be notified via e-mail and/or through a notice on our Web site and any other appropriate methods prior to the Business Transition, and Plaxo?s custody of Your Information will be transferred subject to all the terms and restrictions in this Privacy Policy.

Following a Business Transition, Plaxo or its successors will continue to use Your Information in accordance with the Privacy Policy under which the information was collected. If, however, we plan to use Your Information in a manner different from that stated at the time of collection we will notify you via e-mail and/or through a notice on our Web site and any other appropriate methods. You will have a choice as to whether or not we use Your Information in this different manner. Whether or not you wish to have Your Information used in this different manner, you will retain ownership rights to Your Information and the ability to delete Your Information at any time. Please note, if you have deleted or deactivated your account with the Services or are an opt-out User, then you will not be contacted, nor will Your Information be used in this different manner.

I've found most services do not outline what happens should a business transition occurs, but I wish more would do so. We've found that it adds to the transparency of our company, as well as our privacy practices. It allows people considering our service to better understand how their information is used and stays protected. And that I feel only helps them to make a better and more informed decision.

'till next time.

Stacy Martin
Plaxo Privacy Officer
privacy @t plaxo.com

Today was a momentous day for us at Plaxo as we announced our relationship with AOL. Already, we are starting to get some positive reactions to this announcement.

For the past 3 years, Plaxo has focused on building a useful service that enables individuals to easily connect to the people and information that matter to them. Along the way, we have gathered over 5 million subscribers, and have made technological innovation that bring us close to the goal of enabling people (from wherever they are) connecting with their friends and colleagues (wherever they are) in the manner (e-mail, regular mail, IM, phone, Voice over IP, Text messaging) that is most appropriate.

We are excited about the relationship with AOL for several reasons. Here are a few:

1. The Strength of Our Relationship: While this is not an exclusive relationship, both AOL and Plaxo have committed extensive amounts of time, resources, and energies to make this work. AOL has proven to be a fantastic company to work with through the entire process, and we are very much in synch about the need to provide an integrated and unified communications experience to our users. And...we both believe that our integrated services will be better for most users than either as a standalone. The Plaxo-enabled version of AIM will be the default version provided to the 700K or so people who download AIM every week, as well as the 60M current AIM users and AOL customers as they upgrade over the next several months. Similarly, the AIM enabled version of Plaxo will be the default offered to our new and upgrading members. (Obviously, we respect customer choice, and people can opt-out of the integrated versions if they choose.)
2. What this will mean for Plaxo Customers: Plaxo customers who choose to take advantage of our joint offerings should gain a number of new benefits. First, this will ensure that they can extend their universal address book to work well within AOL clients. Many of our subscribers use Plaxo in association with a work environment (such as Outlook), and use AIM, AIM Mail, or AOL at home, school, or on the road. This should allow them to easily share a universal address book and other PIM information. Furthermore, the integration of AIM presence information within Plaxo means that people will be able to look at the people in their address books (or look at the person who has just sent them an email) and be able to see if they are AIM users, see if they are online or offline, and?with one click, initiate an AIM session. Very cool.
3. What this will mean for the 60M AIM users and AOL customers. If you haven?t played around with the beta version of the newest AIM client, I encourage you to do so. You can already use that client as a way to initiate Instant Messaging, e-mail, text messaging, and Voice over IP calls with your friends, family, and colleagues. With this integration, we?ll be giving the users of these services the critical, up-to-date, accurate, and always synchronized information they need to fully take advantage of these new unified communications features. Plus, we hope that exposure to Plaxo will bring all of the advantages described above to AIM users and AOL members.
4. The Value that Comes from Scale: As a result of our work with AOL, the number of Plaxo subscribers should increase dramatically over the next several months. With as many as 30-60M new members, this should mean that:
   
   
   
   1. Plaxo should become a much more valuable service for everybody. To start with, everyone?s address books should be a lot more linked and a lot more up-to-date as the size of our network increases. Currently, when a new member joins Plaxo, they will find that about 20% of the people in their address book are already Plaxo members (and their entries will therefore have their most up-to-date information.) For the remainder of the people in their address books, people will have to use our Update Request mechanism or similar means to get new information. We estimate that the percentage of linked address entries should go up dramatically and?we hope?the need for update requests will go down dramatically.
   
   
   2. Plaxo?s near-term business model benefits: We?ve had some success already this year generating revenues through subscriptions to our premium services, through our in-context commerce offers (e.g. sending birthday cards), search, and advertising revenues. As the number of users increases, this of course will help us bring in the revenues we need to fund further development and growth, improve our products, pay our engineers, and meet the expectations of our investors.
   
   
   3. Plaxo?s long term business model benefits: Plaxo has always believed that there are a wide range of transactional, enterprise, and network services that we could provide when we had 50M members that we couldn?t provide when we had 5 M members. This should certainly help us on our way.
   
   
   4. Validation of the Work We?ve Done to Date: The fact that a company as well respected as AOL would choose to work with Plaxo on a project of this importance is certainly a testament to the quality of the team of talented developers, marketers, operations, and customer service people at Plaxo. Congrats, team!
   
   
   5. The Opportunity to Work with A Company like AOL: AOL is one of the pioneers of the internet, and has been responsible for bringing tens of millions of people online in a richly rewarding, secure, and high quality environment. We certainly hope to accomplish something similar as the Internet and converged networks move to a new phase of development, and are excited to be working with AOL along the way.
   
   
   
   

Well enough talking. We?ll be going into a beta in early August, and have plenty to do until then!

Ben Golub
CEO
Plaxo, Inc.

A few weeks back, I wrote the below blog entry, which ended up morphing in an article which ran today on CNET. Thought it would be interesting to still post the original version, both because I�m intrigued by the subject, and the blog version is more personal to me.

Ties That Bind

Plaxo is often discussed in conjunction with the many "social networking" sites. As such, I thought I�d touch on one of the more frequently discussed topics in social networking�the value of strong ties between individuals vs. the value of weak ties.

But first�a story.

A few years back, a friend of mine came home from the hospital with his wife and their first baby. They were startled to be met at the door of their house by his mother-in-law who explained her surprise visit by exclaiming, "I couldn�t let my daughter spend the night at home all alone with a baby and a stranger."

A stranger? Apparently, there are strong ties and then there are strong ties. I guess by the standard of a mother�s tie to her child, even spousal ties are suspiciously weak.

In the social networking space, of course, far more of the focus is on the value of less ambiguously weak ties�the connection between two acquaintances, for example, or the connection between an individual and the friend of a friend (FOAF). There is a great deal of sociological research (e.g. Mark Granovetter�s groundbreaking paper) that shows that weak ties are incredibly important, especially in areas such as finding a job or meeting a prospective partner�in fact, Plaxo receives many job candidates thru our postings on a popular social networking site. Indeed, many have argued that since the people to whom you have strong ties travel in the same circles that you do and have access to the same things that you do, weak ties offer more value than strong ties, because they are better able to expand your opportunities.

Most social networking sites are focused precisely at increasing the number of weak ties that an individual has. As a member of one of these sites, I am linked to over 859,400 individuals � 23 are people I know; the other 859,377 are linked to me via 1 to 4 degrees of separation (the 4th degree being the largest group with 755, 200 links).

As someone who met his wife through weak ties (my roommate was dating her roommate and they met through a mutual friend), I�d never knock the power of weak ties. But, I wonder, "Will the technology that makes creating weak ties easy also serve to make them less valuable? Will people soon become skeptical of calls from people who claim to have been referred by a close colleague?"

Arguably, the technology of the past 10 years has made it easier for people to connect to information and businesses, but harder to stay connected to each other. Most of us have at least 8 contact points (home, work and mobile phones, mailing addresses, e-mail, IM screen name, VoIP handles, etc.) that are frequently changing and our friends and colleagues are in the same situation. I believe many have found that people they may once have considered strong ties, have slipped to weak ties over time. And not because they grew apart, but simply because it takes a concentrated effort to maintain a strong tie.

Plaxo is often discussed in conjunction with social networking sites. However I feel we are complementary to these services rather than competing. For better or for worse, Plaxo has focused its efforts on helping subscribers with their existing ties, with people to whom they are already directly connected. For example, I have "only" 325 Plaxo connections to other Plaxo members, but they are almost all people that I knew personally before joining Plaxo. If Plaxo does its job correctly, I won�t accidentally lose contact with these people simply as a result of a home or work move, a changed phone number, or a new e-mail address. In other words, Plaxo helps to strengthen ties that exist--be they weak or strong-- rather than helping to increase the network of weak ties.

There is value in both types of ties, and both types of services. At the end of the day, however, I suspect that the true strength of a relationship in the future will be determined, as it always has been, by the content of the relationship and the effort invested by both parties, rather than the mechanism that established the relationship in the first place.

Ben Golub
CEO
Plaxo, Inc.

For the second year in a row, Plaxo has been awarded "Best Consumer Productivity Product or Service" at the Codie Awards, presented by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA). Our founder Todd Masonis and revenue manager Tod Sacerdoti were on-hand in LA to receive the award. We're all driven at Plaxo by making a positive impact in people's lives and productivity through the software and services we build, and it's gratifying that we've been recognized as a leader in this field for two years running. Thanks to everyone for supporting us!

Today was a big day for us at Plaxo -- we released a few new premium services: 1) Plaxo Address Book Optimizer, 2) Plaxo Mobile Access, and 3) Plaxo Premium Suite. These services will complement our existing free service. See our press release for details.

Plaxo Address Book Optimizer eliminates duplicate contacts from your address book. It's very easy to use and will quickly clean up your address book.

Plaxo Mobile Access lets you access your address book and calendar from most mobile phones. There's no limit to the size of your address book and calendar and you don't need to sync.

Plaxo Premium Suite offers BOTH new services, PLUS our existing VIP Support for a discounted price.

Go to the Plaxo home page to get details on each service.

btw: If you are an existing Plaxo user, you will see some new icons in Plaxo Online that enable you to access these new features from the toolbox:

Expect to see lots of great, new things from Plaxo this year!

Rikk Carey
EVP Engineering & Operations

TV is generally referred to as the "small" screen, but it was big to us just the same. CBS recently brought a bunch of cameras inside Plaxo and followed us around as we worked and played, all in the pursuit of building our business. It's an honest and inside look at the daily life of a young silicon valley startup. The footage aired on CBS MarketWatch Weekend and you can watch the streaming video online: Part 1, Part 2 (free registration required, or you can use bugmenot).

With so much unscripted footage, we weren't sure what we were going to get, but we thank CBS MarketWatch and Bambi Francisco for doing such a great job with the final version. As our founders have said in the past, we want to encourage would-be entrepreneurs to go for it, and hopefully seeing Plaxo will show you that while starting a company is a lot of work, it can also be a lot of fun.

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

From the desk of the Privacy Officer�

I previously noted David Coursey's article titled "Beware of 'Free' Service" where he touches on a number of his concerns regarding Plaxo and other services. Not less than two weeks later, David Coursey wrote a follow up commentary on Plaxo titled "Plaxo Reconsidered".

I mention it, not because David Coursey comes 180 degrees with Plaxo where he now recommends us. It's worth noting because I believe it illustrates the importance of companies like Plaxo to have an open communication and feedback loop with their user community and to fully embrace the user communication channels of today, including e-mail, user forums, and especially blogs.

Our business is based on trust. We realize that trust is not an entitlement, but rather must be continually earned. To build that trust, we are happy to answer any questions people might have regarding our service so we can quickly address any issues and continually improve our service.

I give David all the credit for taking us up on this offer. In his article, David talks about the recent meeting he had with folks from our Executive and Engineering teams. The meeting gave David a chance to ask his questions and Plaxo a chance to listen to his comments. In the end, we didn't agree on everything but it gave us a better user perspective and things to think about in order to better improve our service. I give David even greater credit for publicly changing his position on Plaxo after learning more about our business plan and our promising future.

While I can not promise everyone a face to face meeting, I can promise we will continue to strive to operate in an open and public fashion. But I also feel that open communications can not be solely based on the historical model of waiting for customers to contact Support. Mediums such as blogs, forums, and newsgroups have tremendously empowered users to express their comments and questions in their own specific ways. In order for a company to be successful today, I feel they must reach out to their users as much as possible.

At Plaxo, we've tried to be as proactive as we can in reaching out to users, whether they are Plaxo members or non-members. Of course we provide the ability for anyone to contact us at Support (support_@t_plaxo.com) or Privacy (privacy_@t_plaxo.com). But we also provide other venues to create a greater sense of community and responsiveness. We have our own fairly active User Forums as well as forum groups on both Yahoo! and Google.

But of course my favorite venues are blogs. Blogs, as a result of their ability to quickly publish and syndicate a person's thoughts and comments have shown to be extremely powerful. I've seen the downsides to blogs. For as much as blogs can inform, they can also misinform turning rumor into truth, and speculation into fact.

But I also see the upside. Blogs provide the ability for companies to feel the pulse of their userbase. They tell us what people think and how they feel. And most importantly, they allow for an open and public communications on issues that matter most to people. I can't think of a better way for a company to build trust than by reaching out and embracing this type of user community. My hope is that one day, company officials responding blog postings will be the norm and not the exception.

But as the example with David Coursey has shown, there's still much work to be done. We'll continue to strive to operate in an open and public fashion and allow people to decide for themselves about Plaxo. Hopefully, as occurred with David Coursey, we'll also continue to grow.... one recommendation at a time.

Feel free to share your thoughts with us.

'til next time,

Stacy Martin
Plaxo Privacy Officer
privacy @t plaxo.com

Plaxo has been named to AlwaysOn's AO100 list for 2004. The second annual AO100 list is co-sponsored by management consulting firm KPMG, and honors the top 100 innovative private technology companies that are demonstrating leadership among their peers in at least two areas: market traction measured by revenue or customer growth, and game-changing approaches and technologies that are likely to disrupt existing markets and entrenched players.

AlwaysOn or AO, is the first and only media site with a social network.

AlwaysOn was founded in January of 2003 by former Red Herring editor-in-chief, Tony Perkins, and is dedicated to connecting global leaders and technology industry insiders whose ideas and innovations are shaping the always-on world. AO boasts close to 15,000 active members, and almost 45,000 unique visitors every month.

AlwaysOn and KPMG surveyed more than 1,000 venture investors, investment bankers, top entrepreneurs and executives, who nominated more than 700 companies for the award.

Read the announcement at http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=4805_0_1_0_C

Last night Plaxo was awarded "Best Consumer Productivity Product or Service" at the 19th annual Codie Awards, presented by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA). The Codie Awards have been called "the industry's most prestigious awards program". Plaxo was chosen from a list of more than 600 companies. Ken Wasch, President of SIIA, called winning a Codie Award "a high honor". Our VP of Marketing, Scott Epstein, was on hand at the black-tie gala to accept the award. Thanks to all our Plaxo supporters at SIIA and everywhere!

Read the press release at http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/05-19-2004/0002177601&EDATE=.

See the full list of Codie Award winners at http://www.siia.net/codies/2004/winners.asp.

We're announcing a deal with Yahoo! today where Plaxo 2.0 (to be released later this month) will feature Yahoo! Search from within the Plaxo Toolbar, inside Outlook and Outlook Express. This is the first time that a major Web search engine will be available from inside Outlook. There are a lot of times when I'm reading something in my inbox and I want to search on it, but right now I have to fire up a Web browser and type in the keywords. Now I can just search directly from within Outlook, without losing the thread of what I'm reading. We plan to offer even tighter integration of search and e-mail in future versions of Plaxo, so this is just the beginning of what we have in mind.

Plaxo 2.0 will also have a bunch of other cool features, so stand by. As always, you can still download Plaxo 1.5 today from our Web site and then upgrade easily (and of course for free) to 2.0 when it's released.

Read the press release at http://www.plaxo.com/about/releases/release-20040513

Plaxo was named by Red Herring today as one of the "top 100 private firms driving future of technology". Red Herring publisher Alex Vieux said, "Like Google, eBay and other previous Red Herring 100 alumni, these 100 have the potential to become the next titans of technology." Plaxo was chosen from a list of more than 600 companies "through a careful analysis of financial data and subjective criteria, including quality of management, execution of strategy, and dedication to research and development."

Read the full story at http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=SVBIZINK3.story&STORY=/www/story/05-11-2004/0002171545&EDATE=TUE+May+11+2004,+08:06+AM

UPDATE: Plaxo has been selected by the Red Herring 100!

We are pleased to report that Plaxo has been chosen as a finalist in Red Herring's "Top 100 Private Companies" (we're in the "Services" category). The magazine's editorial team performed a rigorous analysis of technology, business models, size and profitability (or potential) to create this list. The winners will be announced at the Red Herring Spring Conference in Monterey, May 18.

For more information, see http://www.redherring.com/EventsHome.aspx

Here is this month's most emailed-around article in the Plaxo World Headquarters, from Privacilla.org's Jim Harper, a noted privacy expert. Harper takes on Roger Clarke from Australia, a consultant who's produced an exhaustive, and "deeply flawed" study, according to Harper. Harper points out that benefits of products like Plaxo Contacts far outweigh any misperceived downside, and that some people just like to stir the pot. His comments also echo what we heard from a major tech business writer recounting a bad reaction to Plaxo at the PC Forum conference. He said that certain vocal members of the "tech elite" were simply out of line and "a bit clueless."

This article is a breath of fresh air. We like it when a supremely qualified person like Jim Harper speaks frankly and insightfully on the misplaced hysteria (and the sheer goodness of our product!).

Read "When Good Technologists Go Bad" at http://www.policycounsel.net/archives/000237.html

The New York Times has a great article on Plaxo today, written by Louise Story (Free Registration Required). Make sure to check out our growth chart in the right margin (it's kind of hidden). Thanks to all our users, supporters, and critics for helping us get to this point, and stay tuned because we have a lot more on the way!

Read the full story at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/05/technology/05plaxo.html

The Wall Street Journal recently featured an article about Plaxo. Many thanks to our enthusiastic users who were quoted in this piece and extolled their extreme satisfaction with Plaxo. That our users love and value Plaxo, and are telling their friends about it, is reflected in our growing network. Since May 2003, Plaxo has registered more than 1.6 million users and more than 23 million people have responded to their requests for updated contact information.

We are thrilled to have been profiled by the country�s top business paper, however, the article raises some important points that deserve further clarification. The first is the comparison to spam. It�s important to know that every interaction between Plaxo users and their contacts is initiated by the user, the owner of the address book. Like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or Outlook, Plaxo is a software application and service that people use to send emails. While Plaxo computers handle the mechanism of sending the emails on users� behalf, Plaxo, the company, does not send emails to anyone. All update requests are deliberate, initiated by the address book owner.

We�d also like to re-emphasize our rigorous commitment to privacy. BusinessWeek recently praised our privacy policy, calling it one of the most stringent they�ve ever seen, going above and beyond the industry standard. While it�s an extreme and dramatic example, the Pentagon official mentioned in the story had his concerns about Plaxo resolved to his satisfaction. Privacy and security are part of our core values and we built Plaxo Contacts from the very beginning with both in mind. We want consumers to feel comfortable about using Plaxo Contacts, to have no qualms about it at all. Our business depends on our users trusting us with their personal data and we have every reason to protect that trust.

All in all, we�re thrilled to have been profiled by the Wall Street Journal, and are looking forward to spreading the Plaxo story to more people.

Read the full story at
http://www.plaxo.com/css/about/wsj_20040227.html

BusinessWeek online just published an article entitled The Perils and Promises of Online Schmoozing in which they discuss the potential privacy concerns raised by social networking services. Plaxo is touted as a trailblazer in consumer privacy protection. BusinessWeek columnist Jane Black writes:

Plaxo, a company that enables users to automatically update their Microsoft Outlook address books, aims to protect customers' information through one of the most stringent privacy policie