Plaxo is now fully integrated with FriendConnect--Google's widget-based tool for socially enabling any web site. This means on any site running FriendConnect, you can now securely connect your Plaxo account, see which of your contacts are also on that site, and invite any of your contacts to join that site. And, perhaps coolest of all, you can choose to have any activities you share on that site flow back into Pulse, so your Plaxo connections can keep in touch with you across the web and discover new sites you've found.

This is a truly useful and exciting integration--it's the closest we've come yet to a seamless social web ecosystem, in which users can take their identity and relationships with them across the web, find the people they know at a new site, and share activity back with their existing contacts, creating a virtuous cycle of more social discovery and sharing. This is how the social web should work--rather than having to start from scratch every time you try a new social site (which is still the norm for most sites today), each new experience you have should enrich the others.

This only works when services give their users control over their data and provide them with secure access using open standards. And that's exactly what Plaxo is doing with FriendConnect. When you connect your Plaxo account, we're using OAuth so you don't have to give out your Plaxo password, and you can always choose to revoke access later. And when you share activity from FriendConnect back into Pulse, we're using the OpenSocial 0.8 RESTful Activites API. The only custom integration right now is with our address book API, and we're already working with the community to develop an open standard for that piece of the puzzle too. We firmly believe that acting as an Identity Provider, Social Graph Provider, and Content Aggregator--that is, letting our users take their data and relationships with them across the web and share data back from anywhere--is good for users, good for Plaxo, and good for the Web. And we're just getting started--stay tuned for additional enhancements, including more fine-grained control over which of your family, friends, and business network you want to connect with on other sites, and who you want to see your shared activity from FriendConnect sites!

Here are some screen shots of Plaxo's integration with Google FriendConnect--or you can experience it for yourself on any FriendConnect-powered site.

We’re passionate advocates of opening up the Social Web, and have been working hard on a number of initiatives in support of that vision (including OpenID, microformats, OpenSocial, consolidated online identity, and the Social Graph API). Today, we are pleased to add another (really exciting one) to the list: Google’s just announced “Friend Connect.” And we’re announcing that Plaxo will become a “Social Graph Provider” in support of this bold initiative to “socially-enable any webpage.”

What is a Social Graph Provider, you may ask? It’s any social network that elects to let its users take their “friends list” with them to use all over the open Social Web. We assert that this is a critical missing piece at the center of a “services layer” for the emerging Social Web ecosystem:

The above chart shows all the parts, and how we see them fitting together. At the center is the user, with ownership and control of their data – and the freedom to take it with them, wherever they go. At the edge is a large and growing number of socially-enabled websites. In between, are a set of services that take friction out of the process for using yet-another social site:

• Identity Providers give users access to a new site without having to create a new username/password pair. (Example: Yahoo’s implementation of OpenID.)
• Social Graph Providers give users a way leverage their existing relationships, instead of manually re-creating them all over the place. (Announced examples: Plaxo Pulse, Orkut, MySpace and Facebook.)
• Content Aggregators give users a place to see what their friends are creating and sharing all over the Social Web. (Examples: Plaxo Pulse, FriendFeed, and a long and growing list, and recently, Facebook.)

As these elements evolve in the coming months, we expect to see lots of good things happening at socially-oriented sites of all sizes. But what if you could tap the power of this new service layer without having to directly interface with any of its elements? What if you could simply sprinkle in a few lines of javascript, and make any webpage social? That is awesome promise of Friend Connect.

A lot more to come
In line with this vision of a Social Web ecosystem, we’ve been working for a while toward becoming a Social Graph Provider. So, when Google approached us to collaborate on Friend Connect, we saw the perfect opportunity to turbocharge our effort. There’s still a bunch of work to be done, but at launch, the intent is to enable you to access your full address book or any subset of Pulse connections (family, friends, business network) on any Friend Connect page or site. Down the road, we intend to let you tell us which relationships are strong enough that you’d like to have them available to you elsewhere, without having to be asked to reconnect.

For now, we’re really excited to see how quickly all this is coming together. 2008 is really becoming “the year of data portability,” and the year in which we collectively evolve beyond the “walled garden” model of social networking.

John McCrea
VP of Marketing

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

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

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

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

Hooking up disqus comment syndication when sharing a blog inside Pulse

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

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

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

--Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect

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

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

Ever since the launch of the beta version of Pulse, we’ve been adding features at a rapid pace, often on a weekly release cycle. We’ve kept the service in beta all these months, because we’ve known that we were still missing some really important pieces. Chief among those was a member directory that would let you search for people by name. Indeed, “People Search” has been one of our most requested features in surveys, focus groups, and usability testing.

Today, we open then doors on that new capability. Connecting to your friends and colleagues who use Plaxo just got a whole lot easier.

In order to protect the privacy of our 20 million members, we’ve made the process of joining the directory strictly opt-in, with the ability to opt-out at any time.

Going the opt-in route is great for protecting privacy, but it does mean that People Search will start from a relatively small base – and then get better over time. So, please be patient, while the number of people who have opted in grows over time.

John McCrea
VP of Marketing

Most of us are choosing to share ever more of our lives publicly on the web, on blogs, Flickr, and an ever-expanding array of user-generated content sites. One result of that is that our public identities are becoming ever more fragmented.

Naturally, giving users the ability to create a unified public profile – enriched by some (or all) of their aggregated content stream in Pulse – was something on our product roadmap for later this year.

But a collaboration between our Joseph Smarr and Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick dramatically accelerated the timeline. We jumped when we got the chance to have our public profile pages serve as the flagship example of things made possible by Google’s new Social Graph API, which was just released an hour ago. (See coverage in TechCrunch and ZD Net.) Pulse uses the API to make it easy for you to gather up the various URLs that belong to you all over the public web and use them to create a unified public identity under your control.

As you can see in the above screenshot, this is a totally new kind of public profile for the Social Web. The page is not static; it’s constantly enriched by the aggregated stream of the content you are creating all over the web.

Public profiles are a completly opt-in feature. You’ve got fine-grained control of what content and information you include. And, because the pages are tagged with the appropriate microformats, you can use your Plaxo public profile to assert your public identity in a way that’s readable by Google and other sites. The result is that you have control and portability of your public identity.

This is just a first release. Expect to see us invest a lot more in this area in the coming weeks.

To set up your public profile, go to Pulse, then click on My Profile at the top. Then, on the left-hand side, click on Public Profile.

It’s great to see the building blocks of the Social Web coming together so quickly!

John McCrea
vp of marketing

We soft-launched a “status” feature in Pulse about a week ago, and it’s already proving to be very popular. But for people using lots of different services, having yet another place to type in what they’re up to is hardly a convenience.

Indeed, if you’ve been following the Plaxo story closely, you know that we’re not trying to build “yet another social network”. Instead, we’re on a mission to help bring about an open version of the Social Web, one defined by interoperability between sites, with you in control of your data and content and how it moves between services.

So, in line with that vision, we’re enhancing the Pulse status feature with the ability to synchronize it with other services, starting today with Twitter. And what’s really cool is that you have a choice of one-way or two-way sync. What does that mean?

If you set up status sync to Twitter, when you update your status in Pulse, it will be instantly updated in Twitter. (And, as you’re typing, you’ll see a character countdown from 140 and the ability to shrink links via tinyurl.)

(In addition, if you’ve already installed the Twitter app on Facebook, that status message you originated in Pulse will update your status inside Facebook!)

And, if you also choose to sync from Twitter to Pulse? When you’re in Twitter – okay, admit it, that may be most of your waking hours – your tweets will automatically update your status in Pulse. (And don’t worry, we do some smart “echo cancellation,” so you’ll only see one copy of your status update in each place.) At release time, such updates in Pulse are not instantaneous, but they will be soon.

If you haven't hooked up your Twitter to you Pulse, start by adding the feed. You'll be prompted with how to also set up sync status. If you're already feeding your tweets into Pulse, just go edit your Profile Settings.

We think this is both a really useful feature and a great demonstration of things to come when social sites interoperate. You could also imagine that future versions of the status feature might sync with other services, such as Jaiku. Let me know which ones you’d most like to see. Just send a tweet to johnmccrea!

If you're anything like us, you can't stop checking your Pulse. If you're anything like some of us (the cool ones), you also have an iPhone. That's why us cool people got together to make a special iPhone version of Pulse. Everything is custom made for that little iPhone screen, allowing those of us with sausage fingers to easily see photos, messages, and web-wide updates (from over 30 sites) from the people you know.

This is just the latest way we're helping you get your data where you need it. We recently rolled out integration with the Mac address book and Microsoft Outlook. To access Pulse on your iPhone, just point your browser to http://pulse.plaxo.com and sign in. You'll be redirected automatically (but you can still access the original web version, of course).

All feedback is appreciated. If you don't have a Plaxo account yet, go ahead and signup.

Pete Curley
Senior product manager

PS. Did you know that if you sync your Outlook or Mac with your iPhone through iTunes, your Plaxo contacts and calendar will be in there too? Pretty neat.

Update: Here's a quick video, too...

Just in time for MacWorld, we’re excited to rollout a new version of our Mac client, which brings Pulse to the Mac Address Book! This follows our recent rollout of our integration between Pulse and Microsoft Outlook.

Why do we keep adding integrations points for Pulse into other tools and services?

Because with Pulse, we’re focused on building a really useful social application that helps people stay connected, share stuff, and communicate with their family, friends, and business network. And since most of our members are busy professionals, it’s not enough to enable communication just within the Pulse website; we need to bring Pulse – and the unified address book underlying it – to the communication tools, services, and devices that they use.

The latest version of Plaxo for Mac is a little piece of software you download that does a whole lot of stuff. As always, it acts as a bridge between the Mac’s sync services and your Plaxo account, performing address book and calendar sync as an automated background process. And through the magic of Plaxo’s multi-way sync capability, you then have a single “smart address book” you can use across the disparate worlds of Mac, Outlook, the web, and more.

In addition, there’s some nicely integrated UI that we add to your Mac Address Book, a special details view for each contact. And it’s that UI that we’ve brought to life with Pulse:

- See what the person is sharing on a large and growing list of sites, including blogs, Digg, Twitter, del.icio.us, Flickr, Yelp, and dozens of others
- See other content that they’re sharing just in Pulse
- Click over to see they’re profile and full content stream

(Of course, you only see what that person wants you to see, based on Pulse’s explicit connection and sharing model.)

Plaxo for Mac also mashes up with Mac Mail, adding Click to Connect UI that give you one-click access to maps, directions, and VOIP calls.

If you’re already using Pulse, download the new Mac client here:
http://www.plaxo.com/downloads/mac

If you're not yet a member, get your account set up first.
http://www.plaxo.com/signup

We’re big believers in turbo-charging apps by connecting them to the “social graph,” so expect more down this pathway in the near future.

John McCrea
VP of Marketing

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

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

In the latest weekly release for Pulse, we’ve added another feature that many of you around the world have been asking for – a way to take your aggregated stream of feeds out of Pulse and into your blog (or any web page) with a simple widget. It’s called the “lifestreaming widget,” and you can set it up in seconds.

Just go to http://pulse.plaxo.com/pulse/widget.

You can include all of your external feeds (from any of the 30 or so sites Pulse can pull from, like Flickr, Twitter, Jaiku, your Amazon wish list, Yelp, Digg, etc.). Or, if you prefer, you can limit it to just the ones that you’ve marked as “public” in Pulse.

Then, just cut-and-paste the javascript snippet into the HTML of the page you want to display your widget. That’s it!

Here's mine:

To protect privacy the lifestream feed does not include any contact info, comments, or Pulse connections. It’s just the aggregation of my external feeds (the stuff I’m posting all over the web and choosing to bring into Pulse).

John McCrea
VP of Marketing

Pulse may still be in fairly early stages of beta, but the pace of work to round out the feature set is feverish. This week's release has two key features that people have been asking for.

The first will be of interest to all of the users of the localized version of the service. If you speak Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Chinese, or Japanese, you can now build your network with localized versions of invites and connection requests. For those who've eagerly awaiting this capability, we appreciate your patience!

The second feature will ultimately be of interest to all Pulse users, but in the beginning will be most appreciated by folks who now have a large number of active Pulse users in their network, and who have amassed a large archive from their river of "lifestreams." (For example, I have over 1,000 pages of content that have come to me from family, friends, and folks in my business network.) The feature is Search, and it allows you to mine all that content, searching by keyword across all events and comments that have come your way. It's just our first release of Search, and there's a lot more to add, but already it's a big hit with power users.

Now, two more reasons to check your Pulse.

We’ve been doing weekly product releases for Pulse since the launch of the service in August. I’m excited about today’s release, more than any other, because it makes it really easy for anyone to roll their own social network. And it thereby allows Pulse to become the hub for interacting with all of the personal social networks that you create (or join) via the Plaxo.

What exactly am I talking about? A powerful new feature, called Pulse Groups.

Some background: So far, Pulse has helped restore meaning to the word “friend” by not forcing you to use that one word to describe all of your relationships. With Pulse, you categorize each connection you make as “family,” “friend,” “business network,” or some combination of those three. As a result, you can make conscious decisions about what you share with whom. For example, you might choose to share your Picasa photos with family, your Last.fm weekly-most-listened-to bands with friends, and your Dugg stories and Delicious bookmarks with your business network. But such categorization, while useful, only whets the appetite for even more granular control.

Why? Because we all participate in a wide variety of real-world circles. The content I want to share with my college friends from the early ‘80’s is markedly different from what I want to share with the circle of friends I interact with here in California today.

With today’s release, Pulse now lets you create as many groups as you want. When you create a group, you declare it to be “private,” “moderated,” or “public.” “Public groups” are similar to what you might be familiar with on Facebook, where anyone can see the group and anyone can join. That’s cool and powerful, but personally I am way more excited about the potential in the other two flavors of groups. A “private group” is not publicly visible, and the only way to get into it is by being invited by the creator of the group. I just created two such groups minutes ago. I think everyone should probably do the same (but I’m clearly biased!). “Moderated groups” are similar to private groups, but they’re a bit more visible, and people can request to be let in. The creator of the group has the sole authority to accept or reject.

At Plaxo, we just created a private group for all employees. Ever since we launched Pulse, we’ve been wishing we had the ability to internally share news stories, poll questions, and more – and to engage in company-only conversations about that stuff. Until now, we’ve either had to use “friends” as a proxy for Plaxo employees (with obvious drawbacks) – or continue to use clunky old e-mail for such social sharing tasks. Pulse Groups may be our most interesting contribution to the “Office 2.0” trend.

Of course, this is just a first release of Groups, and there’s a lot more to add in the coming weeks. Maybe I’m stretching when I say that each group is essentially a personal social network, but that’s clearly where we’re heading. Imagine if we let you stylize and customize what you display on your profile for each group you are in.

Aside from this major new feature, today’s Pulse release includes lots of bug fixes and UI improvements. There’s also one other feature we’ve all been clamoring for. It’s “re-sharing.” If you receive some really cool piece of content and you want to forward it, now you can in a couple of clicks.

Hope you enjoy the new features!

John McCrea
VP of Marketing

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! :)

Over the last few months a few of us here at Plaxo have been working hard on a little project called Pulse (press release found here). Well, word got out about it a little early and people were getting a little hot and bothered in the blogosphere for anything that looks like it could take on big daddy Facebook.

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/08/plaxo-to-launch.html
http://scobleizer.com/2007/08/02/the-latest-shiny-social-objec...
http://valleywag.com/tech/social-networks/plaxo-pulse-adds-to-our-soc...

Let me tell you up front that this isn’t our intention. I love Facebook and I’ll probably never stop using it.

I sign in at least 10 times a day to see what all of my high school and college friends are up to. I constantly update my status, upload photos, and have spent dozens of dollars sending oh so stupid “gifts” to my friends. Facebook has totally nailed it. So what’s the problem?

I will never add my mom as a friend on Facebook.

You see, I’m 22, and I’ve been part of the “Facebook Generation” since 2003 when it spread like wildfire on the campus of RPI. Facebook is a place for me and my college friends. I’ve created a persona that doesn’t reflect my family or professional life. I don’t want my mom or potential employers seeing the Halloween pictures of me wearing a turquoise tank top that says “Mrs. Timberlake” in pink glitter. She’d have to go to therapy and I’d have to hit up the unemployment line.

So how is Pulse different?

Your friends and family are creating great online content everyday: photos, videos, restaurant reviews, and a lot more. The problem is that it’s scattered over hundreds of sites and you have no idea when it gets updated. Pulse is a social network for your REAL life. When you connect to someone, you categorize them as a friend, family member, or in your business network. You tell us which sites you already use, and through the power of RSS and APIs we’ll pull in whatever you update and share it with who you tell us to (your family, your real friends, or your business network).

Here are the sites we have so far: Amazon.com, AOL Pictures, Del.icio.us, Digg, Flickr, Jaiku, Last.fm, LiveJournal, MySpace, Picasa, Pownce, Smugmug, Tumblr, Twitter, Webshots, Windows Live Spaces, Xanga, Yahoo! 360, Yelp, and YouTube. (we’ll be adding many more soon)

We want to work WITH Facebook, Digg, YouTube, and every site to connect you to the people you care about. That has always been Plaxo’s goal. I want to drive traffic to Facebook (you’re welcome, Zuck), I hope we get a ton more people reviewing businesses on Yelp, and I pray that there are so many tweets being twitted on Twitter that the internet will slow to a crawl. We want you to be able to share everything from anywhere on the web and we want you to be able to do whatever you want with it. They’re your contacts, it’s your information, and we’re going to do everything we can so that you control it.

Welcome to the open social web. We think you’ll like it here.

--Pete Curley, Product Manager of Pulse

PS. The version of Pulse you see today is a culmination of about 2 months of work from conception to launch (written on top of the totally revamped Plaxo infrastructure, Plaxo 3.0 that we worked so hard on for the last year). That means we didn’t get some things finished that we had wanted to: better profiles, search functionality, RSS feeds from Pulse to the outside world (what use is the open social web if you can’t get your data to anywhere you want?) Oh, yes, and we need to work with the community to develop an open standard that will “open up the social graph,” so you can take your friends list with you wherever you go.

If you have any sites you’d like to see in Pulse, or questions about it in general, feel free to email me at pete@plaxo.com.

Pulse Screenshots