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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hooking up disqus comment syndication when sharing a blog inside Pulse

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

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

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

--Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect

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

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

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

The all-new Plaxo has been in public beta less than 24 hours, and the reponse has been amazing. Even overwhelming. (Sorry to those who have experienced some seriously slow performance, particularly in the morning surge of traffic. We just added a bunch of API servers, so performance should be better now. And to those who may have encountered a sync bug, sorry, too. Feel free to ping me at john at plaxo.com.)

The unveiling of Plaxo 3.0 began last evening at 9:00 Pacific (midnight on the East Coast). The first (and some of the most in-depth) early coverage came from the blogosphere -- specifically from Robert Scoble, who had come to visit us last week to record some video interviews. Scobleizer deserves credit for really breaking the story.

A wide variety of prominent media outlets added their voices to the chorus, including the Wall Street Journal, the San Jose Mercury News, Reuters, GigaOm, TechCrunch, Mashable, Stowe Boyd, ZD Net, InformationWeek, ComputerWorld, Web Worker Daily, Wired, the Register, and more.

It's been great to see the reaction after all the months of hard work. But we also know there's a lot of work ahead of us. Bugs to fix. Critical features to add. Continued investment in performance and scaling. Oh yes, and we know, everybody wants us to get Gmail Contacts syncing! (We're working on it with folks at Google. Stay tuned.)

About a year ago we announced a big change in direction for Plaxo, and since then have been hard at work, quietly rebuilding the Plaxo service. But now, it’s finally here -- a day that we’ve been looking forward to for a long time – the launch of an all-new version of the service, Plaxo 3.0. It’s been in private beta for a few weeks, but today we’re opening the doors to everyone at beta.plaxo.com. (Here are links to the official press release and screenshots.)

There’s a lot that’s new in Plaxo 3.0, but the biggest news is that we tackled the really hard problem of sync across an unprecedented breadth of apps and services. We’re now doing automated multi-way sync between:

- Google (starting with Calendar, with Gmail coming soon)
- Microsoft (Outlook, Outlook Express, Vista Mail, and Hotmail)
- Yahoo! (Mail and Calendar)
- Mac OSX Sync Services (for Address Book, iCal, and iPhone)
- AOL (AIM and Classic AOL)
- Mozilla Thunderbird
- Mobile phones
- LinkedIn

Our new sync platform sync was built using SyncML, an open standard, which means that we’re making it easy for other companies to plug into Plaxo and have the benefit of sync in their own apps. We’ll detail this more on the blog later, but the basic idea is you should be seeing a lot more places to connect with Plaxo in the coming months.

There’s also an entirely new version of plaxo.com, a multi-component “smart address book” web app (an ambitious AJAX app built with Dojo), with tabs for contacts, calendar, tasks, notes, and more. At the bottom, there’s a “sync dashboard,” for easy set-up, monitoring, and management of all your sync endpoints:

The revamped address book component makes getting to your data (and doing something with it) much faster. There’s find-as-you-type search, click-to-call phone numbers (via a mashup with Jajah), plus maps and one-click driving directions (via mashup with Yahoo!):

There’s a fresh spin on online calendaring, some of the fruit from our acquisition last year of the HipCal team. The new calendar features the “Upcoming” view, with gives you instant access to upcoming events today and tomorrow, the weather (via mashup with Weather Underground), “Countdowns” to major events, and embedded photos (via mashup with Flickr):

And there’s one totally new feature that builds on our original vision of keeping you connected to the people you know, but takes it to the next level. It’s called Pulse, and it “brings life to your address book.” Here’s the idea: people you know are creating great online content every day, but discovering it is difficult, and staying on top of it is even harder. Plaxo Pulse takes the effort and complexity out of the process by automating the sharing of feeds, starting with Flickr photos, blogposts, and Amazon Wish Lists, Plaxo contact info, and more on the way.

All of this is now available in simultaneously in English and French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Simplified Chinese. And it's now avilable for free on your mobile phone a http://m.plaxo.com.

As you can probably tell, we're very excited about this release -- and in many ways it represents not just a new version of the Plaxo service, but the launch of an all-new Plaxo, the company.

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

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

Happy WAPping!

-- Mark Jen
Product Line Manager

Plaxo for Mac 1.0 is ready for prime time and is now available for download. We've been busy improving performance, filling out our feature set and fixing some of bugs. Here's a partial list of what's new in 1.0:

• New contact card actions - Quickly send e-cards and get maps and directions for your contacts.


• Better contact history display - Now you can easily see the old and new values each time information in your contacts changes.


• Cooler animations and nicer graphics all around - who doens't like a good lookin' app? :)

Also, we were in the middle of building Entourage sync when Microsoft went ahead and did it for us. With the latest update of Entourage 2004 you can sync your Entourage Address Book with your OS X Address Book which effectively closes the loop. We've added an FAQ with detailed instructions on how to get things set up and running.

As always, please let us know if you run into any problems or have suggestions; we're listening and want to know what you'd like to see. Thanks!

-- Mark Jen, Product Manager

UPDATE: Plaxo for Mac 1.0 has been officially released.

The Plaxo for Mac team is very happy to announce that we've posted what is intended to be the full release of Plaxo for Mac 1.0. This is our release candidate so we don't anticipate any problems; if you're a Mac user that likes getting early access to software, please go ahead and give it a spin.

You can grab the release candidate (1.0 Preview) at:

http://down.plaxo.com/down/mac/beta/

Let us know if you run into any significant problems - our belief and hope is that you'll have a good experience with this release, but we would be remiss if we didn't ask!

If all goes well, this version will be posted to our main Plaxo for Mac download page at the end of this week (and will also be made available to the Auto Update feature in Plaxo for Mac).

Thanks!
Plaxo for Mac Team

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

In our new Plaxo eCards release, you'll find even more ways to add a little personality to your eCards, including one of my favorite new features -- custom card borders.

Three of our graphic designers, Christian Bohland, Michael Rowley, and Bill Tani, came up with the designs, playfully exploring borders made of different physical materials and objects. Terry Chay wrote the algorithm to create the borders across cards of all different sizes and Trevor Gattis engineered the eCards customization panel. Didn't they do a great job?

A wooden frame:	A metal frame:
A cool gel border:	Prickly barbed wire:
An incomplete puzzle edge:	A spray of sunflowers:

And there's more to check out! I must warn you, though. They do get addictive. I went a little crazy this morning creating cards for this post and can't wait to get even more borders up soon...maybe a goth border, shaggy 70's border, bubble wrap border, bling border...hmmmm...

What new borders would you add to Plaxo eCards?

We've just released a new version of the Plaxo Toolbar for Outlook and Outlook Express, version 2.8. There's nothing really dramatic in here, mostly minor fixes and such.

Do those images look better? We're using a better image scaling technique, so the photos on the Click-To-Connect buttons and elsewhere should look nicer now.

Anti-Spam As part of our effort to cut down on unwanted e-mails, the Update Contacts button has been removed from the toolbar, though still available through the menu, and all the recipients are UNchecked by default.

Bugs We also fixed some minor bugs, mostly related to the new Click-To-Connect button.

To download this version of our Outlook Toolbar, visit our downloads page.

Today we released a new beta of Plaxo for the Mac ("Maxo", as we affectionately call it here). Woohoo! And, of course we're all very excited about releasing a new product and finishing something that we've been working on for three friggin' years. There's a deeper meaning to this release, but I will get to that later...

Maxo team: Dru Nelson, Drew Colace, Jie Chen, Wendy Johnson (w/ Rosco), Mark Jen, Christian Bohland

Why did it take so damn long?

Plaxo has been around for four years (yikes!), and at our core, we've always felt that rather than inventing yet-another-address-book (or calendar), we wanted to bring Plaxo features to your existing address book. So, as a small startup in 2002, it made sense to start with Outlook and Outlook Express, since it clearly had the largest user base. And, like many young startups in their honeymoon phase, we had grand plans to quickly integrate with lots of other platforms, such as Mac, Act!, Lotus, Y!, Hotmail, and so on. This same question—"when do we do the Mac port?"—has happened at practically every job I've had (and in most cases, it never happened).

Well, as you can imagine, 2002 faded into 2003, and 2003 faded into 2004, and so on, and we still were putting huge effort into Outlook and Outlook Express. To be really honest, we didn't realize what we had bitten off when we started down the Outlook path—the stuff we've done to make Outlook and Outlook Express support Plaxo is a combination of creative engineering and voodoo incantations—but the good news is that we've finally figured it out and now have time to integrate with other platforms (no more dead chickens!).

Outlook Voodoo priest

[btw: Believe it or not, we started our very first Mac project back in 2002. We asked a few of our Mac friends to work in parallel with our Windows team and to try to stay up-to-date (source-wise). Unfortunately, this was a classic case of starting too early. The architecture was changing so rapidly that the Mac team was constantly out of date and eventually fell too far behind. The good news is that we finally got our APIs down and now have a base to start lots of new integration projects from.]

So, about a year ago we met Drew Colace. He impressed us with his Mac dev knowledge and captivating personality, and after changing our minds another ten times, we hired Drew to get us back on the Mac train. Drew jumped in with both hands typing and launched our first beta of Mac Plaxo in November 2005. Today's release is a major revision and was motivated by a lot of great feedback that we received from the first beta (thanks to everyone that helped!).

Why not do the Mac?

There are many great reasons for a developer or product manager to choose not to do the Mac version. In our case, there are definitely larger online address book user bases out there (e.g. Yahoo! and Hotmail) and Mac OSX is a completely unfamiliar operating system and development environment (and therefore expensive, risky, and complicated). And, a new platform introduces all kinds of new quality assurance and customer support issues. The list goes on, so I'm sure you get the idea. Inevitably it comes down to "is it worth the effort?" This is a question that thousands of product managers and engineering teams ask themselves (and most say "no" for reasons similar to above).

Why do the Mac?

So, why did we do the Mac? In most cases, the answer is because someone inside the company is a Mac zealot and begs enough to eventually get a programmer to hack out a demo and if they are really, really lucky, it actually ships for a few weeks (but gets little support or nurturing). It's rarely done for the right reasons and thus eventually peters out. But in our case, no one was a Mac zealot—although, we now have several Mac lovers at Plaxo—and we had no programmers with Mac dev experience. So, two things influenced us: 1) a Mac version of Plaxo was clearly the most requested feature we received; 2) the Mac community is rabid about products and embrace new things (if done well) with passion and enthusiasm; and 3) we firmly believed that we are not an Outlook-only shop. So, we saw a great opportunity to grow a small segment of extremely active users and force us to develop APIs that encouraged integration with Plaxo across a broad set of platforms.

API is the key

So, the story-within-the-story is that Plaxo is developing a platform to enable widespread integration. And, we wanted to eat our own dog food before others used our API. So, Maxo was the perfect choice to test this out since it was so different from the development environments that we were used to. We figured that if the APIs worked for a Mac programmer, they will work for anyone. :-) And, the only reason that it took us so long to release Maxo was because it was the guinea pig for future API users. As you can guess, this slowed Drew and team down quite a bit, but they persevered and shipped Maxo.

UI Evolution

Integrating Plaxo into the Mac Address Book offered unique UI challenges to us since we were less familiar with the Mac user experience and we recognized the importance of a 100% Mac experience. Anything less and we expected to be ignored by the Mac community.

A few key things drove our user experience design: 1) 100% Mac, 2) integrate into the Mac Address Book, not compete with it, and 3) find the right visual balance between "fits in" and "stands out."

Our first revision looked like this. We created a separate Plaxo address book application that synced with the Mac Address Book. This immediately felt weird and forced the user to make a choice between the Mac Address Book and the Plaxo Address Book.

Screen shot of Maxo first alpha release

In our second revision (Beta 1), we tried to integrate the Plaxo features into the Mac Address Book. We added the Plaxo widget at the bottom of the contact entry, but found this to be problematic and often obscuring the contact details.

Screen shot of Maxo first beta release

And, our current Beta looks like this. We moved the Plaxo enhancements to the right side of the contact details and enabled users to expand and contract the panel. This appears to be the best choice, but we're still looking for feedback.

Screen shot of Maxo second beta release

You can download the latest version at: http://www.plaxo.com/downloads/mac/

See the press release at: http://www.plaxo.com/about/releases/release-20060314

--Rikk Carey, EVP Engineering & Operations

Woo-hoo! The Plaxo Toolbar for Internet Explorer version 1.0 has arrived and we've included some goodies in it for everyone:

1. AIM users: AIM users can now sign in with their AIM screen names and passwords.
2. People who are thoughtful, but lazy: Send eCards directly from the toolbar or while looking at a contact's details. "Thank you" and "Happy Birthday" cards are only a click away.
3. People who are bugged by bugs: While we were at it, we thought we'd fix some bugs too.

Upgrade or download your toolbar now. It's good stuff: http://www.plaxo.com/ietoolbar

Janice Ta, IE Toolbar Product Manager

We released a new version of the Plaxo Toolbar for Outlook and Outlook Express earlier this week. The latest version is 2.7 and it is available immediately for download from the Plaxo website. As always, existing Plaxo toolbar users can upgrade to the latest version by going to the Plaxo / Help / About Plaxo menu and clicking on the upgrade now link.

This client release comes right on the heels of our latest Plaxo server release and the introduction of the Plaxo Open Platform Program and Open API, so I can tell you that Engineering, QA, and Product Management have been extremely busy.

The Plaxo Toolbar v2.7 includes a number of bug fixes, but also adds some very exciting features worth mentioning. The most significant are the enhancements made to the Click-to-Connect button. The CTC is the integrated Plaxo button that appears in the upper right corner when reading an email message. The CTC adds a personal touch to emails by displaying the sender's Plaxo photo on the button of if they are in your address book. Members also find the CTC button a convenient way to add the sender to their address book if they are not already there.

With the v2.7 release, we've enhanced the look and feel of the CTC and added a few more options. The button still shows the Plaxo member's photo and current status if they are already in your address book. But now the CTC button will also show the sender's Plaxo Photo even if they are not in your address book as long as that Plaxo member has already given you access to their information.

Also new is clicking on the CTC button which drops down a at-glance view of the contact showing additional details such as title and phone number. How many times have you received an email from someone and wanted to quickly give the person a call? Now the information is just a click away.

We've also added my personal favorite, a "more info..." button. This button opens up the contact's entry within my address book. For me at least, I often wish to reference the notes field for a contact and the "more info..." button makes it much easier to get to this information.

You still can easily add the person to your address book or send them your updated contact details. You'll also find the options to send the person an eCard or get a map or directions to their location.

Note about maps: Due to limitations with Yahoo Maps, the map feature only works for addresses located in the USA, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and United Kingdom / England. If the contact includes the appropriate Country within their address information, Plaxo will be able to perform a proper look up via Yahoo Maps.

And now with Plaxo Toolbar for Outlook and Outlook Express v2.7 out the door, Engineering is already hard at work on the next release. We should have some very exciting announcements to make soon so stay tuned...

Be sure to check out our press release today regarding our Open Platform Program. More information is available at: http://www.plaxo.com/api.

Our Open Platform Program encompasses our open API as well as the Plaxo Address Book Widget.

The Plaxo API is currently available as a Representational State Transfer (REST) Web Service and allows developers to integrate Plaxo synchronization functionality directly into their own applications. For example, our recent Plaxo for Thunderbird client utilizes the Plaxo API. In the future, other representations or protocol bindings may also be defined.

The Plaxo Address Book Widget allows a web site developer to add address book functionaity to their site through some very simple scripting. Visitors to the site can (1) seamlessly import contacts from multiple address books, (2) select entries, and (3) enter selected data into web page forms. For the millions of existing Plaxo members, the Widget allows them to access their complete Plaxo address book directly from any website utilizing the Address Book Widget.

For users, imagine being able to go to your favorite online store, selecting a gift, and auto-filling in the shipping information directly from your Plaxo-enabled address book. For web site developers, imaging offering greater ease and convenience to your users, and knowing that the information they are providing is accurate and up-to-date.

As you may have seen, Thunderbird 1.5 is now available for download, and we've got an updated Plaxo Toolbar for Thunderbird to go with it. In addition to supporting Thunderbird 1.5, this new version is faster, more stable, and contains various other bug fixes. If you're already running the toolbar in Thunderbird, you can just go into the extensions manager and click "Update" to get the new version. Otherwise you can download it from our site. Enjoy!

Thanks,
The Plaxo Team

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks,
The Plaxo Team

Around every 6-12 months, the Plaxo software autoupgrades to the latest build of the Plaxo client. This is done to provide minor patch fixes, incorporate minor new features, and phase out older versions of the client software that are no longer supported (ie: 0.x)

The autoupgade is rolled out over time, so in the coming weeks, members may notice their Plaxo client prompting them to install the latest version. The upgrade should take about a minute to complete and does not require any further action on the member's part.

The latest version of the Plaxo client being autoupgraded to is version 2.4.x.x.

Members can also manually check if they are running the latest version of Plaxo. You can go to the Plaxo / Help / About Plaxo menu to see if you have the latest version. If you do not have the latest version, you will have the option to upgrade from there as well.

Some of you may have noticed our new Plaxo Alerts recently rolled out.

Based on member feedback, we've redesigned the alerts to make them more informative and useful, helping to enhance your usage of Plaxo. We'll post some upcoming blog articles that discuss the new layout and features of the new alerts, and we'll continue to tweak and improve them over time.

But unfortunately, with the rollout of the new alerts, we also discovered a minor problem. Normally, a member receives an alert notification anytime an entry in their address book is updated through Plaxo. A bug in the new alerts caused a small percentage of Plaxo members to receive some alerts where no contact information had actually changed. No address book data was corrupted, but the alerts may have been confusing. We've fixed the problem, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Should you have any questions, concerns, or feedback, please let us know by contacting our Support Department.

Today is an exciting day for the open source fans at the office—we�ve officially announced the first beta of the Plaxo Toolbar for Thunderbird. If you�re already a Plaxo member, just go straight to the download page and get started! If not, just register for a Plaxo account first, it should only take a minute. :)

It�s no secret that we�ve been planning a Thunderbird client for some time now but we wanted to make sure we got some crucial things right, including:

• Cross platform support—this means the client was written in JavaScript and is packaged in a standard XPI—so it will work on Mac and Linux as well as on Windows.
• An easy sync experience with your Plaxo address book and all the other address books Plaxo supports—this means you can sync your personal Thunderbird account with your Outlook account at work, and/or access your Thunderbird contacts on the Web from anywhere.
• An enhanced Thunderbird address book with some of the popular features from our Outlook toolbar—such as the "Click to Connect" button when reading your e-mail, support for photos and microBlogs in your address book, and one-click access to Plaxo Online.
• Most of the usual Plaxo features that you are used to.

If you use Thunderbird, give our toolbar a try and let us know what you think. We�d love to hear your comments and feedback on our forum or through e-mail at beta [at] plaxo.com.

btw: This represents a big step for Plaxo—as we continue to expand the platforms we support—since it reaches an entirely new set of people that we have not been able to support. Expect to see more platforms later this year. Note that many Plaxo users are not aware the we already support Internet Explorer and Yahoo! (beta).

Thanks and enjoy,
The Plaxo Team

PS: For you developers out there, note that we�ve released this toolbar under the Mozilla Public License, which means it�s open source and you�re free to tinker with it. To help facilitate, we�ve set up a developer area on the Plaxo forums. We�re also actively working on an open API that will let anyone Plaxo-enable their favorite application, so stay tuned!

This is Dru Nelson, the Plaxo engineer that built most of Plaxo for Thunderbird. He's a great guy, good friend, and a heckuvan engineer!

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

We've been hard at work improving and extending the Plaxo service and we recently released new versions of both our toolbar for Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express as well as our web version, Plaxo Online.

In the latest toolbar, we've rehauled the internals to dramatically increase performance and stability. We also added "find as you type" (ala Firefox) to the Update Contacts Wizard. Everyone should upgrade to this version when they get a chance.

In Plaxo Online, we've fixed a number of bugs and improved performance as well. We've also added several new features, some of which we recently announced in our Plaxo Beta Program:

• Birthday reminders - all new members will now receive reminder e-mails a week before anyone in their address book has a birthday coming up. You can click send a free e-card, buy a printed birthday card, or send flowers or gifts through our partners, including Barnes & Noble, RedEnvelope. Best of all, Plaxo can pre-fill the billing and shipping information from your address book (with your permission) so that you don't have to type it in yourself. You can turn off birthday reminders for individuals or altogether—as usual, you are in complete control. Existing users that want to enable birthday reminders should visit their Account Settings and check "E-mail Birthday Reminders" under the notification preferences section.
• Send-to-phone - all members can now use Plaxo Online to send address book entries to their mobile phone without any extra software, cables, or syncing. Simply click "send to phone" next to a contact and it will be sent wirelessly to your phone, where you can accept it and add it to your phone's address book.
• Holiday list maker - If you're planning to send gifts or cards this holiday season, Plaxo can help you build up your holiday recipient list and make sure you have the information you need. Choose people from your address book and we'll list them for you with their mailing addresses. You can edit the addresses yourself or ask the people on your list for an update. Once your list is ready, you can print it as a handy reference. Even better, you can send printed holiday cards to the people on your list, and Plaxo will fill in the addresses so you don't have to write out all the envelopes. You can make your holiday list now or look for the new "Holiday list" button in your Plaxo Online contact list.
• And more - don't forget to check out our new Duplicate Contact Remover and Plaxo Mobile Access, both available inside the Plaxo Beta Program.
  

We hope you enjoy the new features, as well as the increases in reliability and performance. Many of the features we added and bugs we fixed came from user feedback, which we always appreciate. Please continue to let us know if you encounter any problems or have any suggestions!

Thanks,
The Plaxo Team

We're pleased to announce the new Plaxo Beta Program.

- Try new Plaxo products and services before they're released to the general public.
- Help improve Plaxo by sharing observations and frank feedback with Plaxo engineers.

If you are interested, visit http://www.plaxo.com/beta to learn more and sign up for free.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This BETA release includes several new features and services:

- Duplicate contact remover -- remove dups
- Birthday reminders -- makes it easy to send birthday cards and gifts
- Mobile web access -- WAP access to your contacts and calendar
- Send-to-phone -- send phone numbers to your cell phone

Most of these will become paid services, but are free during the beta period.

NOTE: Remember http://www.plaxo.com/beta and use this to activate each new feature.

Send bugs and feedback to betasupport@plaxo.com.

--------------------
Rikk Carey
EVP Engineering & Operations
Plaxo, Inc.

We just released some new features for Plaxo Online that you might want to check out:

• New: Automatically import your Yahoo! Address Book - now you can automatically import your Yahoo! Address Book into Plaxo simply by entering your Yahoo! ID and password. You can find Yahoo! Auto Import during Plaxo Online registration or by clicking "Import" in the top-right of contacts.
• New: Folder Manager - allows you to rename and delete your Plaxo Online folders. Lots of our users asked for greater control of their folders, particularly when they're using Plaxo across multiple computers. To access the folder manager, select "manage folders" from the folder pull-down menu in contacts, or click "manage your folders" in the upper-right of calendar, tasks, or notes.
• New: Card Sharing Manager - this lets you see everyone that you've shared your private cards with and lets you easily grant and revoke permissions. It provides a nice snapshot of your connected Plaxo network.
• Improved: Account Settings - we've simplified and slightly reorganized the account settings page to make it more powerful and intuitive. There's a new "Your E-mail Addresses" section that shows you all the e-mail addresses you're using with Plaxo and makes it easy to edit or delete them and to change your primary e-mail address.

Stay tuned for more coming soon, and as always, let us know if you have any problems or suggestions.

Thanks,
The Plaxo Team

We just released version 1.5.1 of the Plaxo Outlook and Outlook Express plugin. This release contains some new features as well as numerous bug fixes and performance enhancements.

Some noteworthy changes:

• new "Build Your Address Book" wizard, a power-user feature to automatically add people to your address book that you e-mail frequently
• improved installer is more firewall-friendly and can detect and fix many common installation problems
• you can now send update request e-mails from any of your validated e-mail addresses (previously you could only send from your primary e-mail address)
• Enhanced user interface for synchronization progress dialog and preferences dialog
• fixed a bug where some address data got hidden for outlook express users
• numerous minor bug fixes (many pointed out to us by our users!)

To get the latest version of Plaxo, go to http://www.plaxo.com/downloads and click "Download Plaxo Now". Please post comments if you experience any problems.

Thanks,
The Plaxo Team

We have just released some updates to the Plaxo Web site. Most of the changes are in preparation for the new Outlook/Outlook Express plugin that will be coming out soon, but there are also some new features we wanted to tell you about:

• You can now manually update any contact to be in the "Replied" state by using the Web site.
• You can now send update requests from any of your e-mail addresses (coming soon to the Oulook/OE version as well)
• New "How to Reinstall Guide" on Help Center
• Importing your address book on the Web site now works with the MAC Palm TSV file format
• Improved the lost password and lost security answer pages
• New About Customer Care page
• You can now select a contiguous block of contacts in the "grid view" of the Web address book by checking the first contact and then holding Shift and clicking the last contact
• Added ability to rename contact folders on the Web site (look for "Rename Folder" at the bottom-right of the Web address book)
• Several minor bug fixes

If you haven't checked out the Web version of Plaxo yet, go to www.plaxo.com and click "Sign In" at the upper-right of the page. If you don't have an account with Plaxo yet, you'll need to register for one first. The Web site can be used in conjunction with the Outlook/OE version of Plaxo or you can sign up as a Web-only user. Please post comments if you experience any problems (or if these changes make your life better).

Thanks,
The Plaxo Team

Plaxo 1.4 Released

Today we have officially released the version 1.4 of Plaxo Contacts. You can download it from www.plaxo.com/downloads, or if you are an existing user, you will be updated early next year. I'm very excited about this release as it fixes a number of long standing bugs in our synchronization engine. I'm proud to say that the most sophisticated sync product on the Internet is now even better! Specifically, we've made the following improvements:

Folder Support - Plaxo now allows you to upload/manage your contacts on a folder basis. This means that you can ignore folders, change the mappings between local folders and server folders, and basically have more control over what Plaxo is doing. Before 1.4, Plaxo stored your contacts in a flat list, which isn't a sophisticated enough model to allow for good computer-to-computer sync.

New Sync Architecture - Most of the synchronization code has been rewritten, so Plaxo is now much more precise about the way it handles contacts. Pre-1.4, there was a lot of indeterminism about when Plaxo would notice changes and how those changes would get to the server.

Merge - Merge has been completely rewritten in 1.4. You should (almost never) see the dreaded merge dialog, which could result in all sorts of havoc.

These are just the big things. There are a number of minor bug fixes and little features here and there. If you have tried Plaxo in the past to synchronize multiple computers, or as your web address book, you should see remarkable improvements in 1.4. Please try it out and let us know what you think.