A new service called Gnip just launched that supplies a sorely needed piece of backend infrastructure for the burgeoning Social Web--making it quick and efficient for user-generated content created on a rapidly growing list of social sites (e.g. Digg or Flickr) to show up in tools like Plaxo Pulse that "aggregate" this data from across the web on behalf of users. Those familiar with Plaxo's eagerness to lead by example by integrating new technologies that help open up the Social Web ecosystem should not be surprised to learn that we’re a launch partner for Gnip, and have already integrated their infrastructure into Pulse.
Here's a bit of info on how Gnip works, why it's good for Plaxo users, and why it's good for the Social Web:
In a nutshell, Gnip acts as a middleman that notifies aggregators of social media, like Plaxo, when user-generated content sites, like Digg or Flickr, have new content they need to distribute. So, rather than us having to repeatedly ask our content site partners, "got anything new for any of our users? how about now? now?", Gnip notifies us when there’s new stuff from any of our members, so we can immediately pick up that content and show it to the people who are supposed to see it in Pulse.
For Plaxo users, the benefit is simple: when you digg a story or bookmark a link with del.icio.us, etc. you should see that activity show up in Pulse a lot quicker--often within 60 seconds, whereas before integrating with Gnip, it might have taken an hour or more. Starting today, Digg and del.icio.us should be very quick to update, with Flickr and Twitter hopefully following shortly. And any publisher can easily send data thru Gnip using their API, so if Pulse pulls feeds from your site and you'd like that content to show up faster, we’ll then make it happen!
For the technically inclined, here's what's happening behind the scenes:
Most of the content in Pulse comes from public RSS feeds for each user who's hooked up one more sites into their Pulse stream. We have background jobs that periodically poll each feed for each user for each service, and whenever we see anything new, we update that user's Pulse stream accordingly. Since we don't know in advance which users have new content at any given time, we have to keep polling each site for each user over and over again. If we want content to show up in Pulse more quickly, we have to poll the sites more frequently, and of course in any given minute, the vast majority of users haven't shared anything new right then, so the process is rather inefficient.
While providing individual RSS feeds for user activity on web 2.0 sites is nothing new, when we launched Pulse about a year ago, we were the first site to consume and aggregate these feeds en masse. Since we have such a large user base, and since polling is rather inefficient--particularly if you want to notice any updates quickly--Plaxo puts a rather large load on these sites, and in several cases even the larger sites have had to tell us to slow down so they can keep up with the demand. Since then, several new aggregator services have followed, including FriendFeed, SocialThing, and others, and as they gain popularity, they're further increasing the load on publisher sites.
Clearly this model will not continue to scale, and since the amount of social content being produced and consumed is rising every day, a better architecture is needed; one that efficiently routes updates from user generated content sites to social media aggregators, rather than the other way around. There are various technical ways to accomplish this today--posting updates directly to the aggregators, federated messaging protocols like xmpp (aka jabber), real-time public update streams, etc.--but few are widely deployed or easy to work with, which is why polling is still the dominant model used. Until now.
Gnip is stepping in to catalyze the shift from polling to pushing notifications by doing the hard work of consuming all the existing notification systems out there today (and polling itself, as needed) and pushing out the relevant updates to consumers like Plaxo and others. Pulse tells Gnip which users we want updates for (e.g. which Digg users have shared their public feed of dugg stories in Pulse), and whenever any of those users digg a new story, Gnip proactively notifies Plaxo, telling us which users have new activity, all within 60 seconds! Using Gnip, Plaxo no longer has to poll with high frequency to get quick updates--in fact, not only can we poll less frequently (which helps relieve the load on both Plaxo and the publishers we're currently hammering), but we get updates much faster than we could before. It's a classic example of a win-win created by reducing inefficiency in the system overall.
A quick note about standards: in the fully realized social web, there should be no need for single points of full centralization, either for Identity Providers, Social Graph Providers, or Content Aggregators. In each case, open standards will allow a decentralized and competitive "service layer" to emerge. For identity, OpenID is such a standard, and its adoption is continuing to spread rapidly. For "who you know" data, OAuth provides a standard way to securely share private data between trusted services, and efforts are underway to also standardize APIs for making address book and social graph data portable. As mentioned above, in the case of sharing and aggregating social web activity data, things are a bit more nascent. Standards like xmpp may someday gain wider adoption, but until then an opportunity exists to help realize that vision sooner.
Just as companies like Clickpass have stepped in to make OpenID more user-friendly and widespread, so too is Gnip stepping in to make scalable content sharing a reality sooner rather than later. In both cases, Plaxo is supporting these efforts because they provide useful value today, and they demonstrate the potential that truly opening up the social web provides, which we believe will bring about the future we all want even more rapidly. Today marks yet another acceleration of that progress, and we all know it won't be the last one!
--Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect
Plaxo is now fully integrated with FriendConnect--Google's widget-based tool for socially enabling any web site. This means on any site running FriendConnect, you can now securely connect your Plaxo account, see which of your contacts are also on that site, and invite any of your contacts to join that site. And, perhaps coolest of all, you can choose to have any activities you share on that site flow back into Pulse, so your Plaxo connections can keep in touch with you across the web and discover new sites you've found.
This is a truly useful and exciting integration--it's the closest we've come yet to a seamless social web ecosystem, in which users can take their identity and relationships with them across the web, find the people they know at a new site, and share activity back with their existing contacts, creating a virtuous cycle of more social discovery and sharing. This is how the social web should work--rather than having to start from scratch every time you try a new social site (which is still the norm for most sites today), each new experience you have should enrich the others.
This only works when services give their users control over their data and provide them with secure access using open standards. And that's exactly what Plaxo is doing with FriendConnect. When you connect your Plaxo account, we're using OAuth so you don't have to give out your Plaxo password, and you can always choose to revoke access later. And when you share activity from FriendConnect back into Pulse, we're using the OpenSocial 0.8 RESTful Activites API. The only custom integration right now is with our address book API, and we're already working with the community to develop an open standard for that piece of the puzzle too. We firmly believe that acting as an Identity Provider, Social Graph Provider, and Content Aggregator--that is, letting our users take their data and relationships with them across the web and share data back from anywhere--is good for users, good for Plaxo, and good for the Web. And we're just getting started--stay tuned for additional enhancements, including more fine-grained control over which of your family, friends, and business network you want to connect with on other sites, and who you want to see your shared activity from FriendConnect sites!
Here are some screen shots of Plaxo's integration with Google FriendConnect--or you can experience it for yourself on any FriendConnect-powered site.
One of the best features of Plaxo Pulse (and other sites that do social content aggregation) is the ability to have discussions (via comments) about the items being shared. A link to an interesting article, recent photo, YouTube video, Yelp review, tweet, etc. is often the jumping-off point for a rich discussion amongst people who all know and care about each other. In such cases, the comment thread is often far more interesting than the original item that sparked it. Some of these discussions happen privately between mutually connected friends or family members; others are public discussions about public content, but filtered through the people you know, rather than what everyone on the net has to say (look at the comment stream for any YouTube video, and the signal-to-noise issue is obvious).
Most of the time, this system of comments inside aggregators works quite well. But one place where it's never felt quite right is when someone shares their public blog, which also has its own comment stream on the blog's website. In such cases, the conversation can too easily become "fractured", as some people read and post comments on the blog's web site, and others do the same inside an aggregator, but with a different set of comments. Whereas a separate comment thread can be an asset in the case of private or "noisy" content as mentioned above, many blog authors would prefer to maintain a single thread of comments, no matter where their post gets viewed. This issue has been brought up periodically since the early days of Pulse, and it recently saw a resurgence of fervent debate in the blogosphere.
Plaxo's mantra is always to "give our users control", so naturally we're in favor of letting blog authors share their feed inside Pulse and providing a way for comments generated inside Pulse to flow back to the original blog. The problem is, there's no standard way of programmatically interacting with the comment system on an arbitrary blog. So while it's never been our aim to "trap comments" inside Pulse, there hasn't been a good way to set them free. Until now.
Starting today, we've integrated Pulse with a cool startup called Disqus that makes a "smart comment system" plug-in that works with most popular blog software. If you install Disqus to run the comments on your blog, in addition to their standard improvements like threaded comments, rating comments, verifying commenters, integrated forums, and more, you can now also choose to have any blog comments posted inside Pulse also show up on your original blog. This is possible because Disqus provides a common platform with APIs that let blog authors tell Pulse where their blog comments live, and lets Plaxo automatically syndicate any comments posted inside Pulse. So if you write a blog, now you can have the best of both worlds--more people can find and comment on your blog posts using tools like Pulse, and yet you can maintain a single thread of comments for everyone.
Hooking up disqus comment syndication when sharing a blog inside Pulse
Comments posted inside Pulse will then also show up on the original blog post
If you haven't yet shared your blog inside Pulse, now is a great time to set it up. [If you're not already running Disqus on your blog, they have an easy wizard to help you set it up, and it works with most popular blog software, including MovableType, TypePad, Blogger, Tumblr, and self-hosted wordpress, though sadly not yet hosted wordpress blogs on wordpress.com, since they don't let you run JavaScript in plugins.] Then when you hook up your blog to Pulse, you just check "I use Disqus for my blog's comments" and fill in your disqus forum URL (e.g. for my blog http://josephsmarr.com, my associated disqus forum url is josephsmarr.disqus.com). [If you're already sharing your blog inside Pulse, you can click to edit your existing feed and then add your disqus forum url.] Now when anyone sees one of your blog posts inside Pulse and goes to comment, they'll be notified that any comments posted inside Pulse will also appear as a comment on your original blog post. And when they do leave a comment, it will show up on in your disqus-powered comment thread soon afterwards, and without you or them having to do anything. Disqus will notify you of a new comment just as if they'd commented directly on your blog, and similarly the commenter's name, email, and webpage will be automatically filled in along with the comment.
We're excited about this new ability to keep discussions shared across an open social web. It's one more step on the path away from walled gardens and toward a world in which users are empowered because their data is portable. If you're a blogger, give it a try and let us know what you think!
--Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect
PS: If you have any feedback on this integration--or anything else about Plaxo--let us know (using the disqus-powered comments on this blog post, of course--whether you're reading this on our website or from inside Pulse!).
UPDATE: Check out the post from our vp of marketing, John McCrea, on this topic.
For users and developers that care about opening up the social web, one of the key building blocks for establishing a durable and portable online identity is OpenID. Recently the excitement and adoption of OpenID has skyrocketed, with Yahoo! providing OpenIDs for their entire userbase, Google's Blogger both providing and consuming OpenIDs, and several large organizations joining the OpenID foundation. Coupled with the security and usability enhancements added to the OpenID 2.0 spec late last year, it seems that OpenID is really going mainstream.
With the great progress made on the technical (privacy and security) aspects of OpenID and the increased adoption by mass-consumer companies, the user experience of OpenID is increasingly a topic of focus. There's a user-education hurdle to get used to the idea of logging into a site using an account you already have elsewhere, and the experience of bouncing between sites and attaching an OpenID can be jarring. An exciting aspect of Yahoo's approach to OpenID was trying to push the technology itself "under the hood" so users just see a friendly "Sign in with your Yahoo! ID" button and are taken to a familiar Yahoo login page. Now a new startup called clickpass, which is launching today, is taking things even further with their magic one-click signin button that removes the back-and-forth dance entirely, and integrates with a number of popular OpenID providers and consumers--now including Plaxo.
When you go to sign into Plaxo, you'll now see the distinctive orange clickpass button under the "Other ways to sign in" section (alongside our other OpenID integration points). The first time you click it, it will take you to a setup screen on clickpass's site that asks you to log into Plaxo if you already have a Plaxo account, or if you're new to Plaxo, you can sign up for a Plaxo account using your clickpass OpenID (no need to create a separate Plaxo password). Thereafter, when you come to Plaxo and click on the clickpass button, you're immediately signed into Plaxo. That's it, just one click.
It's now definitely the quickest and easiest way to sign into Plaxo, especially when you're on a different computer that doesn't remember your saved passwords. And what's cool is that you can hook up clickpass to a bunch of the sites you use, so you just log into clickpass and get one-click access to all the sites you've attached. And that first-time merge/signup page you get when using a new site is always the same, since it's hosted by clickpass. So the idea is that users should quickly learn how to sign into any site that supports clickpass, since the button is recognizable, the user flow is always the same, and the whole process is designed by a company that's primary focus is OpenID usability. Hopefully this will also encourage more sites to start consuming OpenIDs, since now there's a stronger case to be made that it's something mainstream users can understand and benefit from. There's still more work to be done on OpenID technology and usability of course, but this is a major step forward.
Today marks a tremendously important milestone for believers of an Open Web. Yahoo! has announced it will provide OpenIDs for its nearly 250 Million users, meaning they will all be able to carry their digital identity with them in a secure way and use it to interact richly and securely with sites across the web. In parallel, Plaxo has also just released full support for consuming OpenID 2.0, which means among other things that all those Yahoo! users will be able to join Plaxo and use it to synchronize their data without having to create and manage yet-another-login-and-password. And of course so will the users of any other site that supports OpenID. That’s the great thing about open standards—the more people use them, the better they get.
Having a company as big and important as Yahoo! embrace a grass-roots, open-web standard like OpenID is a major accomplishment and validation. OpenID is now officially a mainstream technology, and the proof is that millions of users will now be able to take advantage of it, without ever knowing what OpenID is, how it works, or that they’re even using it. That’s because OpenID 2.0 (which was finalized late last year) includes a number of security and usability enhancements that will make it “just work” for mainstream users. In addition to the current “sign in with your OpenID” functionality on Plaxo, you will soon see a simple button that says “Sign in with your Yahoo! ID”. When you click this button, you’ll be taken to Yahoo!, where you sign in as you normally do, and you’ll be asked if you trust Plaxo to know who you are. Once you consent, you’ll be taken back to Plaxo, and presto! We create an account for you that’s tied to your Yahoo! account via OpenID. When you want to log into Plaxo, you log in via Yahoo, and Plaxo knows who you are and that you’re logged in, thanks to some cryptographic magic on the backend that you never have to worry about. All you know is “I use Yahoo, and now I can use it with Plaxo too.” That’s what it feels like when open social web technology really works.
And that’s just the start. The reason people are excited about OpenID—and the reason Yahoo! has chosen to embrace it—goes far beyond the convenience of single sign-on. The real power of OpenID is that it’s a key building block for giving users a durable and meaningful digital identity that they can use across the entire web. In an OpenID world, the services you use will really know who you are (because you can prove it with OpenID), and they’ll be able to talk to each other in a rich and secure manner (because you are now the same person to both sites). So, you’ll be able to consolidate your online identity (to the extent you want to, of course) and present a unified view of who you really are. And your friends will do the same. So when we talk about an “open social web” where you can stay in touch with the people you care about even though you’re all using different tools and services, this is what we mean. And this is how it’s going to happen. And today it just got real. If you can’t tell, we’re pretty excited.
=joseph.smarr, chief platform architect
At this week's Internet Identity Workshop, all the pieces finally came together. We now have the tools we need as a community to really make friends-list portability work--a way to give users back the control and power they deserve to take their local piece of the social graph with them wherever they go. And most importantly, a way to do this all securely, with respect and control for privacy and also the ability to find people that want to be found. There's no more need to wait. Game on.
The three missing pieces that came together at IIW were OpenID (version 2.0 is now final), OAuth (version 1.0 is now final), and clarity on the roles and responsibilities of users, social networks, and social applications in an open social web. IIW brings together an incredible community of people, and it's a major accomplishment for the web that all these technologies are now ready for prime-time.
I hosted a session at IIW in which I sketched a vision for how these pieces could come together to enable practical friends-list portability, and everyone was enthusiastic and supportive. And this included people from Google, Yahoo, AOL, JanRain, claimID, and members of the grass-roots community. In fact, I couldn't get anyone to pick a fight with me over any of technical or privacy details, and this is a group that prides itself on picking fights over technical and privacy details! So I think we're on to something big.
Here are the slides from my session (PPT, 408K), as well as detailed session notes from Chris Messina. If anyone has any further or feedback, please leave a comment here. Several people have also asked how they can help move this project forward more quickly. I think the next step is basically to do some strawman implementations of the various specs and glue code, and then to try and get it built into social networks and applications that "get it". Let me know if you'd like to get involved in this community effort to open up the social web (this complements ongoing work from fellow Open Social Web trailblazers like Brad Fitzpatrick, David Recordon, Tantek Çelik, and others).
And as far as Plaxo goes, the fact that these technologies now have final specs and the IIW community has blessed the vision for friends-list portability, you can expect us to step on the gas here in a big way. This is what Plaxo does best: we help you get your data out of sites and services that don't otherwise make it easy, and we make it work for you everywhere you go. There are a lot of sites that know who-you-know and a lot of social applications where you want to find people you already know. These open standards provide the foundation for solving this current inefficiency, and Plaxo is going to help put the solution in the hands of millions of users, sooner not later. This will be a major focus for us in 2008, and you should expect to see a lot more happening here very soon. It's going to be a good year for the Social Web!
--Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect
Of all the community events working towards an open social web, the most productive and insightful--and the one I look forward to most--is the bi-annual Internet Identity Workshop, held in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. That's where OpenID was really debated and matured to the phenomenon it is today, and it's also where all the people behind related (and would-be competing) ideas like CardSpace, Liberty, Sxip, LID, and so on came together and found a way to converge their visions and work together. It's also where Plaxo learned to deeply understand and embrace open standards, community involvement, user-centric identity, and the crucial balance of idealism and pragmatism required to get an open vision meaningfully deployed in the real world.
All this happens at IIW because the right people are there, and the workshop fosters the right attitude. It's not a traditional conference--it's an un-conference-style workshop hosted and attended by peers. Most of the thought leaders who are developing the new concepts and technologies you've heard about for identity, security, and data-exchange on the web will be there, alongside the people who are bringing those ideas inside AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, and other companies that can deliver these things to millions of users. And there are also individuals and small companies that want to learn about this space more deeply and find out of they contribute to the conversation.
If you're one of those people, you should try to come to IIW. This is my third IIW, and every time I meet more amazing people, learn a ton (both at the conceptual and technical levels), and leave with a renewed sense of energy and optimism that we can deliver the future we want. The people who come here are passionate about what they do, and they're always happy to explain their ideas and motivations to new people who want to get involved. At my first IIW, I didn't know anything about most of the concepts that are now at the center of my work at Plaxo on opening up the social web. I owe a debt of gratitude to everyone at IIW that took the time to help me understand, and I'm pleased to now be in a position where I can do some of that teaching as well.
At the next IIW (December 3-5), we're sure to talk about OpenID, oAuth, identity consolidation, friends-list portability, and more. Plaxo will of course be there (and we're pleased to help sponsor this time as well). The spirit you'll feel at IIW is that we're all in this together, and together we can make great things happen. I'll see you there.
--Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect
I just got back from Google's Campfire One event, where they officially launched the OpenSocial project. As long-time advocates of the Open Social Web, we're thrilled that Google is leading this initiative, and even more thrilled that it's been received so positively! This is a huge deal, and it's perfectly aligned with our vision of empowering users to regain control of their social data across all the tools they use.
To keep the momentum going, we've been working hard to implement the OpenSocial APIs in Plaxo Pulse, and in fact we've just released it into production, making it the first live OpenSocial implementation in the wild. So if you'd like to play around with open social gadgets or develop one yourself, there's no need to wait any longer!
Now, if you've looked closely at the details of OpenSocial, you know it's still a work in progress. The APIs are only at version 0.5 and they're still changing almost daily. So expect a bit of a bumpy road for the next few weeks, and be aware that things may break along the way. But we'll do our best to keep things running smoothly and keep up with the changes as the specs continue to develop. [One quick note: for now we're only allowing specific apps from known developers that we've white-listed to run in Pulse. Email us at OpenSocial@plaxo.com if you want to get your app white-listed, and as the APIs and security models get more fleshed out, we'll ease off these temporary restrictions.]
We're releasing support for OpenSocial now because we want to make sure that everyone who's getting excited about it has a place they can channel their energy and get things running sooner. To that end, we've done our best to comprehensively support the existing OpenSocial APIs and integrate them richly within the Pulse experience. Specifically:
- users can add now add gadgets to their Pulse profiles (click on My Profile at the top of Pulse and then Applications on the left side)
- each gadget also has a full canvas page inside Pulse
- we support complete profile and contact info for the profile and friends-list APIs
- we support storing gadget prefs via the people data APIs
- gadgets can create activity streams and publish activity data, which will show up in the normal Pulse stream (alongside the existing feeds in pulse) with rich rendering support
- each activity can be commented on like normal feed items in Pulse
In addition, we've built OpenSocial gadget support into our new Dynamic Profiles feature, which means just as you can now show a separate profile (photo, bio, contact info, interests, etc.) to your business contacts and your friends, you can also add gadgets separately to your professional and personal profiles, and also control which sets of contacts see the activity streams from those gadgets. So if you just want to emote with your friends and not your business colleagues, now you can!
In case you can't tell, we're really excited to see the social web continuing to open up, and you can bet that we'll continue to push for even greater control, portability, and integration across all the sites and services you use. This is a major step forward, and there is plenty more to look forward to soon!
PS: To celebrate the launch of OpenSocial in Plaxo Pulse and to demo it to anyone that's interested, we're having an OpenSocial "Open Social" at Plaxo on Friday afternoon at 4pm in our office, and everyone's invited. Get all the details on upcoming (and don't forget to add the upcoming feed to your pulse stream so your friends can see you're coming! ;)).
--Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect
Ever since I started working on the "open social web", I’ve wanted to co-author some kind of crisp and clean manifesto or "bill of rights" to explain to all the social sites what their users will increasingly ask of them, and what specifically these sites can do to "be open". While there's plenty of room for discussion about various implementation details, it's become increasingly clear to me that if sites just do a few things right for their users in terms of openness--both technically and by having the right spirit--the rest can be layered and tweaked and otherwise made to "just work" for users.
Last week, I met with Marc Canter, and we found that our notions for how the open social web should come about were very much aligned. Over the course of several hours, we developed a lengthy, bulleted list of thoughts, philosophies, and pragmatic approaches. As we reviewed that outline, a set of core ideas stood out to us, which we could succinctly frame as a "Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web." In the following days, we circulated a draft with a number of thought leaders in the community, and were pleased to have Robert Scoble and Michael Arrington offer their support and sign-on as co-authors of the document.
That Bill of Rights has now just been published at http://OpenSocialWeb.org. The document lays out the basic rights that users should demand from any social site they use, with respect to ownership, control, and freedom of movement of their personal information. It also describes four things that sites need to do if they want to be truly supportive of those fundamental rights.
I realize that not every company that operates a socially-enabled web app will readily agree with the ideas put forth in this Bill of Rights. Handing over ownership and control to the users might even seem crazy to some. But from our own experience at Plaxo, as the custodian of millions of our users's personal address books, such user-centric policies are good for business as well as good for users. For years, Plaxo's privacy policy has included these core principles:
- Your Information is your own and you decide who will have access to it.
- You maintain ownership rights to Your Information, even if there is a business transition or policy change.
- You may add, delete, or modify Your Information at any time.
And to be clear, "open" doesn't necessarily mean "public". Plaxo users generally consider their address book data to be extremely private, but they still want the ability to get it in and out of the trusted tools and sites they use (such as Outlook, Mac address book, Yahoo!, etc.). And "open" also doesn't mean "less control over who can see what"--each site will decide what user experience works best for their users. What matters is that whatever data your users can see, they should also be able to syndicate and use with other services they trust.
We think it’s time for socially-enabled web sites to stop competing over who can build a higher wall to trap their users' data. Instead, we are actively working to make sure that the "social web" is as open and vibrant as the Internet itself. We also firmly believe that the space of social apps is not a zero-sum game--as it becomes easier to find out what other sites your friends are using and to consume that content in novel ways, everyone will end up with more traffic and more satisfied users. We've already seen a bit of this with Plaxo Pulse users discovering and using new social sites by seeing what else the people they know are creating online, but the impact will be far larger when it's distributed across the entire web.
Lastly, this Bill of Rights is part of a larger conversation that has been going on for some time and with many important voices. It echoes earlier work like DigitalConsumer.org's Bill of Rights, follows earlier work in open data portability within the FOAF and microformats communities, and more recently, builds upon the conversations I've had with people like Brad Fitzpatrick, Tantek Çelik, Chris Messina, Dick Hardt, and others about practical ways to bootstrap the solution we all want. I hope the conversation continues to grow, and I hope this helps both sites and their users clarify how they want the social web to work, so that they can collectively make it so.
It’s very exciting to see Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordon’s thoughts on the Social Graph make it into the public discourse. I’ve been talking off and on with them about the open social web for most of the year, and it’s impressive to see how quickly things are materializing. It also echoes the growing desire that both users and developers have for freeing their data from walled gardens and putting users back in control of who they know. This is something we’re actively working on at Plaxo, and there’s still a lot more to do!
First of all, we agree emphatically with several of the points Brad and David make:
- Users are frustrated that they have to re-build their friends list on every new site they go to, and this also impedes the development of new socially-enabled applications.
- The answer is NOT to have one company own the social graph and require all apps to be re-built on top of a proprietary platform in order to gain access to it.
- We have to help users regain control now, and we can’t assume that all social sites will be cooperative (at least right away), nor can we wait for everyone to agree on a single interop spec.
- Users care about enhanced functionality and convenience being delivered, not about any particular standards or data formats (per se).
- Users won’t generally want all the same friends on all the sites they use, but they do want to know when anyone they know on a given site is also using other sites they also use. In other words, the goal is to aggregate who you know across all the sites you use and then let you choose who to connect to where in what capacity.
Looking at things through the lens of Plaxo, which helps 15+ million people around the world keep track of who they know by syncing their existing address books across the many tools they use, there are also a few additional points we think are important to make:
- While having an open-source, non-profit entity collecting and serving the entire social graph may be better than a single proprietary company or a mess of disconnected companies, we think the ultimate solution has to be that each user owns and controls their own profile and list of friends. Different people will trust different companies to act on their behalf as stewards of their online identity and relationships, but no single entity should ever have to be the gatekeeper for the entire world.
- Our users tell us that the contents of their address book are private and that preserving their privacy is very important. So while some users are happy to declare their list of friends in an open and public way, we feel that dealing with private data is essential, and certainly much more than “10% of the problem”. I think there are ways to separate the details of authentication from the exchange of info, but it’s worth noting that wanting your data to be portable doesn’t mean you want (or need) it to be public—it is sufficient that you can move your data between two trusted parties without those parties needing to agree explicitly a priori to inter-operate.
- Linking and crawling the graph of URLs that describe your profile on different sites to aggregate your profile and friends lists is a great idea (and one we intend to support in Plaxo Pulse). But for many users, e-mail addresses in address books is still the de facto standard for representing their relationships, and we believe supporting linking by e-mail address in the open social web will still be important for the foreseeable future. These are complementary techniques of course, and they can be partially unified by using mbox_sha1sum and similar tricks, but the basic process that most social networks use today of “give me your e-mail address book, and I’ll tell you who you know on this site based on their e-mail address” should not be overlooked. Sites will differ on how much access they give you to other users’ e-mail addresses, but I think there are ways to make it work that may actually be simpler than assuming that profile URLs are the main identifiers to deal with.
These are exciting times and I’m thrilled to see so many people getting involved in these important discussions. You can count on Plaxo to stay involved, both in the discussion and as a service that will support emerging open standards and best practices for keeping users in control. It’s hard to say yet how this will all turn out, but it’s great to see the momentum building for the opening up of the social web.
Hi, I'm Joseph Smarr. I've been at Plaxo since the very beginning, so as you can imagine I've worn a lot of hats over the years (including most recently the architect of Plaxo Online 3.0, which we just released). I want to tell you about my newest roll as Plaxo's Chief Platform Architect. I'm now focused on helping Plaxo wire up the social web, and we're doing it with open standards. Here's why:
Plaxo's core mission is to help you stay connected to the people you care about. Doing this properly means integrating with the applications and services that you and your contacts already use, since that's where daily digital interactions take place. When we started Plaxo in 2002, this basically meant plugging into Desktop PIMs like Outlook. But since then, we've seen a remarkable flourishing of socially-enabled web services: photo sharing, blogging, social networks, social news, social bookmarking, and the list goes on. These days, "staying connected" to your family, friends, and colleagues means more than having their up-to-date contact info. It also means staying current with the digital lives we're all increasingly living.
Plaxo's vision has always been to integrate with all the tools and services that benefit from knowing who you know. We've built quite a few plug-ins and sync points ourselves (Outlook, Mac, Thunderbird, AIM, Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, LinkedIn, etc.), and a number of partners and developers have built additional integration points using our APIs. Lots of sites also use our widget to let their users access their address books across the web. But there's always more to do and we certainly can't do it on our own.
We believe that people will continue to create and consume content across a wide variety of services, and that no one site will ever be the de facto destination for everyone in the world. Thus we see the task of keeping who you know and what they're doing in sync across different sites and tools as core to Plaxo's mission, and an important challenge that our experience makes us well-suited to meet.
We also believe the best way to help wire up the social web is to continue embracing open standards and providing users with transparent access to their data across all the sites and services they use. Plaxo 3.0's sync engine is built on top of SyncML, vCard, and iCal; Plaxo Pulse is powered by RSS; and this is just the beginning for us. We envision a world in which users can easily find out who they know on any service and stay on top of what they're sharing. This can only happen if sites are open and let their users stay in control.
I'm incredibly excited about Plaxo's opportunity to help contribute to the open social web! Doing it right is a full-time job, and in fact it's now my full-time job in my new role as Chief Platform Architect. It's always been a personal passion, and my new title and focus reflects the importance that Plaxo is placing on it. So expect to see more support for open standards, more and better APIs, more widgets, and more developer tools to help empower our comrades.
If you believe in the Open Social Web, please tell me how you think Plaxo can best help out. You can always get my latest contact info at joseph.myplaxo.com. Or come find me at MashupCamp, OSCON, or similar events in the future.
--Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect
If you've followed our blog, you know that at Plaxo we love to periodically do all-day Hackathons, which we call Haxo days. By now we've created a ton of cool little features and products, but so far we have not done a good job of getting them into the hands of our users. It's often a lot of work to take a side project and fully integrate it with our existing code and UI, but many of the things we've built could be perfectly useful on their own. We just haven't had the right home for them. Until now.
Starting today, we've got a new Plaxo Labs site, where we'll be putting a bunch of projects we cooked up in our spare time that we want to share. Some are rougher than others, but they're all far enough along that we'd love you to play with them and let us know what you think.
To kick things off, we've released the following five projects to Plaxo Labs:
- A new-and-improved Plaxo WAP site for mobile phones (like our first WAP version, this project started as a passionate side project by one of our engineers and quickly turned into a full-featured product)
- A plaxo search page for quick lookup of all your Plaxo data, which can also be added as a search plugin in IE7 and Firefox
- Plaxanoid: the classic game with a Plaxo twist (this was one of our engineer's way of teaching himself JavaScript, and it definitely brought company productivity to a halt for at least a day as we all started playing it)
- A map view of your entire address book--it can take a while to load, but it's a really interesting new way to see all the people you know
- A downloadable troubleshooter for Outlook that can automatically diagnose many of the common connectivity problems our customer support team normally deals with
This is just the start--now that all our Haxo projects have an easy place to get released, expect to see a bunch more things on labs in the near future. For each project, we've set up a discussion group and email address for feedback--please let us know what you think and what you'd like to see!
--Joseph Smarr, Architect and Haxo enthusiast
Late last year we were told that our current collocation facility was unable to provide us with additional resources (power/cooling). So, we decided at that point to begin looking for a new location to host the Plaxo application. This was a large undertaking for the Operations team and required concise timing, and a thorough understanding of how each of the components that make up the Plaxo back-end would respond.
After nearly 4 months of searching for a new location, negotiating details of the contract, procuring new hardware (racks/power management/etc…), securing a solid data migration specialist, and painstaking selection of what systems would be moved when, we were ready to start phase 1 of 2.
Then an interesting issue came up, we were moving some database servers, web servers, various others, but how would they communicate on the back-end with the other existing infrastructure? Well, Layer42 (one of our NSPs) came to the rescue, and was able to provide us with an amazing service, proving their excellent flexibility, and commitment to the customer. They set us up with a literal cross connect between the facilities, even setup some VLANs on this link, allowing those now moved systems to communicate across this link as if they were still on the same LAN. Sweet.
Plaxo designed our back-end infrastructure to not only scale horizontally, but to always have online replicas of critical data, ensuring that those replicas were physically separate systems. This early decision enabled us to move approximately 50% of the site (100+ systems) while the customer never noticed we were in a degraded state. After the first move was successfully completed, we migrated all the database services and caching service from the old location to the new location by simply promoting the secondary copy of each database to be the primary, and vice versa. This was done over 2 weeks, and laid the groundwork for phase 2.
Well, phase 2 was recently completed, and I’m pleased to say it went quite well. Not a single support request asking why the site was offline, or why their data was unavailable.
-- Ethan Erchinger
Operations Manager
There has been a lot of buzz in the news in the past week or so regarding a change in Daylight Saving Time. For the past twenty years, DST has started on the first Sunday of April, but as a provision of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, it will change to the second Sunday of March, which in 2007 is this Sunday, March 11.
For people in the tech community, this change is not as simple as turning a clock forward one hour. Since so many computer systems depend on time, the change means late hours for programmers like me so our users can sleep easy knowing that a computer glitch won’t make the users of their applications late for any appointments next week. Since over 15 million people across the globe depend on Plaxo to store and organize their address books and calendar data, we have spent the past couple weeks working to make our system configurations are in ship-shape and we will stay posted next week in the event that any DST-related problems arise.
Many people are reminded of Y2K craze that hit the nation a few years ago. Some of you may be delighted by the fact that you may have another chance to justify the bomb shelter you built 8 years ago, which by now has become merely a storage room for Beanie Babies, VCRs, Ricky Martin albums, and other items that have become obsolete since the dawning of the new millennium. For the rest of you, I think it is safe to say we do not have to worry about a nuclear holocaust so much as our microwave clocks being off by an hour on Sunday, along with all other appliances which have not been programmed to deal with the change.
You may be thinking "What else can I do to prepare for the new DST law?" Most home computers will be updated automatically to deal with the change. Windows users can visit this page which will walk you through a process to confirm your system’s DST integrity. Other than that, see that those you work with are aware of the change by confirming your appointments. So make sure to remind your friends, families, and coworkers that some of their electronic devices might be "misbehaving" and for the ones who don’t use Plaxo, remind them not to miss any appointments ;).
Update: Those of you who are using Outlook may have noticed that some of your recurring calendar events were off by an hour this morning. This has nothing to with Plaxo -- it's a known Outlook bug (they store hard-coded version of the DST rules upon event creation, so old recurring events will have the wrong DST rules). Microsoft has released a tool that finds and fixes these events. You can download it here.
--Glenn Dixon, HipCal Engineer
A couple of us from Plaxo went to Dojo Developer Day #2 (or 3D2, as the locals called it) this past weekend, hosted at AOL's mountain view campus. We've been making extensive use of Dojo in some of our new soon-to-be-released web development, and it's been really valuable.
If you haven't heard of dojo, it's a major open-source project to build high-quality reusable JavaScript code that solves many of the common problems you face when building an Ajax app (working across browsers, separating your code into modules, making API calls, etc.) and also empowers you to build cooler apps fastert (animation, drag-n-drop, widgets, etc.).
In addition to the general discussion about the future of dojo, highlights for us included chatting with the lfx-animation authors (which we've been really stressing in some of our work), Alex Russell's talk about improving performance (something we're focused heavily on right now), and some cool dojo-enabled show-and-tell projects, including a sweet real-estate search site that makes me want to buy a house in Colorado. :)
It's great to see the energy and sense of community behind Dojo, and we're glad to be along for the ride!
Plaxo's Joseph Smarr will be at the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) this Mon-Wed at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. If you're attending the workshop, come by and say hi!
At Plaxo, we're always looking for new and better ways to help our users access and sync their contact and calendar data across the sites, apps, and services that they use on a daily basis. The status quo is that every new service we want to sync with requires our users to enter a new login/password and requires Plaxo to implement a new authentication and data access scheme. Clearly this does not scale well. We look forward to the day when users can authenticate once, perhaps using something like OpenID 2.0, and then immediately connect Plaxo to a host of services--many of which we've never even heard of before--and the authorization and data access will be automatic, transparent, and secure, because of the open standards and protocols being used.
The technologies being discussed at the IIW (including OpenID, Sxip, Liberty, and more) are the most promising developments towards this vision, and we're excited to share our ideas and real-world challenges in support of this important work.
Whoa, it had been a while since we checked the stats on our Address Book Access Widget, and that thing is really taking off! The graph shows the monthly usage of the widget across all web sites that host it, and as you can see we're now helping over 250 thousand users access their address book data on other web sites every month. And the graph is, as our marketing guy John likes to say, "up and to the right". :-)
There are dozens of web sites of all sizes using the widget these days, but the two that currently drive the most activity are YouTube and Gaia Online. YouTube was actually one of our earliest widget users; I still remember showing an alpha prototype to Chad back in December 05. Even though the UI was still a bit rough, he immediately grokked what we were doing and was excited to use it for his "up and coming video sharing web site". YouTube's success is an inspiration to us all, and we'd like to think that Plaxo contributed in some small way to their meteoric rise in popularity during this year.
Gaia Online is one of our newest widget users, but they are already sending the widget more traffic than any site except YouTube. If you haven't seen it, Gaia Online is a virtual world with Avatars and quests, as well as the world's largest bulletin board system. The service is so popular that its users regularly donate money to the site, even though most of them are under 18! The founders of Gaia came and visited Plaxo for lunch this fall. After showing us a demo of Gaia Online that blew us away, they said they were interested in using our widget so their members could invite their friends to join Gaia. I sent an e-mail later that afternoon with instructions for hooking up the widget, and they replied that it was already done and would launch the next day!
Behind the scenes, getting the widget to fill data from Plaxo's domain to the site hosting the widget button led us to develop a new cross-site mashup technique, which we affectionaly refer to as "The JavaScript Wormhole". The talks we gave about this work at OSCON (ppt) and MashupCamp (ppt, video) have generated a lot of discussion, and we're excited to participate as this new field continues to develop.
In the meantime, if your web site lets your users invite their friends, share content, or build a social network, please consider taking advantage of Plaxo's widget. Your users will thank you and, who knows, it might even turn your site into the next YouTube! ;)
--Joseph Smarr, Architect / maker of widgets
During our recent Haxo day I decided to help one of our less productive employees contribute more to the company. For the past few months we’ve had a Nabaztag keeping us company by our desks. He’s a little plastic rabbit who connects to wifi and can be configured from the web. It can check your email, tell you the weather, let you know how the stock market is doing, and even practice Tai Chi. We thought it’d be really cool to have him read out Plaxo statistics every day, especially since we knew the 15 million member milestone was approaching quickly. Luckily for us, this guy has an open API you can use to send him text to read and directions to position his ears.
After only a week of practice he announced that we’d reached 15 million members. Swoot! In celebration, and since we enjoy the sound of his voice so much, we thought it’d be fun to let you send him messages too. We welcome compliments as well as criticisms.
So go ahead, send us a message!
Update: Thanks to everyone that sent us a message so far! By now, everyone in the office knows all-too-well the Nabaztag's "I'm about to announce a message" melody! :) Keep 'em coming. Here's a selection of the messages we've received so far:
- Hooray for over-priced wifi-enabled geek toys.
- Get back to work and stop messing around. You've got 15 mill subscribers to support.
- Do you really hear this in your actual office?
- Mark Foley was framed!
- I wonder how long before you turn this off .....
- thanks for the great product (ical/vcal support please)
- So what's the ratio of plaxo spam emails sent out to number of users?
- You should write a Plaxo calendar module for Google home pages.
- Hey guys, You rock, Congratulations
- Who's in the office so late? ;) Thank Mark Jen for this!
- Congrats Plaxo, it is nice to see you grow.
- Please tell your users how the Hip Cal integration is going!
But our favorite message so far came from the Nabaztag creators themselves (I wonder how they found out):
Hello, it's Marvel in Paris from Violet, we wanted to congratulate you on your achievements. What is Plaxo exactly about ? Did you look out the window of your office today ? By the way what is the name of your Nabaztag ? Take good care of each of you. Aurevoir !
In response, Plaxo is a "smart address book" (learn more), yes we did look out the window today, and our Nabaztag's name is jsmarr. Thanks for asking, and thanks for making such a cool and lovable gadget!!
A bunch of us at Plaxo are spending the day (and night!) at Yahoo as part of their first open Hack Day. It's a brilliant idea and so far they're doing a great job of running it--from the logistics (plenty of parking, food/drinks, excellent wifi coverage, lots of help on hand) to the content (the talks have all been fun and interesting, and all their stars are out and about, including Jeremy Zawodny, Cal Henderson, Doug Crockford, Andy Baio, and more). They're also setting up an impressive outdoor stage for their "surprise really awesome band" tonight (no one would tell me who it is, sorry). And the event has already served as a good deadline for Yahoo to release a bunch of new developer features, like Flickr JSON output (yay, at last!) and bbauth for Yahoo! IDs (very interesting potential here).
We can't wait for the festivities and hackery to begin this evening, and we plan to stay the whole night (you can track the fun by watching the hackday06 tag on flickr). So if you see any people with Plaxo t-shirts, that's us, come say hi! And if any fellow hackers are looking to integrate their users' address book data in their projects, don't forget to check out Plaxo's widget and APIs.
--Joseph Smarr
The good folks at Mashup Camp have put videos online from all the talks at Mashup University. I gave a talk on behalf of Plaxo about how to use our widget and APIs to make a "smart address book mashup" on any web site. I had previously posted my slides, and now you can watch the entire talk (.mov, 77.5MB)!
What we said back then in June is even more true today--almost every web site these days is using address book info (sharing content, inviting friends, social networking, etc.) and for most of these sites, building a hotmail auto-import or Outlook plug-in is probably the last thing they want to do. This is exactly why mashups are such a good idea. For instance, at Plaxo we use Yahoo! Maps instead of trying to build our own mapping solution. Not only does it save us work, we'd never be able to do as good a job because it's not our core focus. Similarly, most web sites should consider using Plaxo's widget and APIs instead of trying to build yet-another-address-book.
--Joseph Smarr
Hi from Portland! I've been here all week at OSCON 2006, the annual O'Reilly Open Source Conference, as has fellow Plaxite Terry Chay. It's been a lively and action-packed event (read as: none of us are getting much sleep). I gave a talk about Cross-Site Ajax on Wednesday afternoon, and it generated quite a lively discussion afterwards, featuring some key people from Mozilla and Google (this is why it's so cool to talk at a place like OSCON!).
Here are the slides from my talk, which include (among other things), some helpful links for more info on cross-site browser issues and the proposals others have made for making things better. Kevin Yank blogged a detailed summary of my talk, which subsequently got picked up by Ajaxian and others. Since one of the main points in my talk was "we need to talk more publicly about these issues", I'm glad to see that my presentation has already sparked some fresh discussion!
Thanks to everyone that came to my talk or met me in the hallways or at dinner. I was impressed an inspired to see how intelligent, thoughtful, passionate, and real the people at OSCON were. I can't wait to return next year (this was my first OSCON). If you missed OSCON (or even if you didn't), check out the OSCON photos on flickr and extensive coverage in the blogosphere.
--Joseph Smarr
P.S. The lovely and talented Caitlin recorded my talk in HD video, so we'll post the edited video when it's ready.
P.P.S I started writing this post last Thursday afternoon, but I'm just finishing it now because Anil and Brad kept me up past my bedtime at the SixApart party (thanks, guys! ;)).
I had a great time this week at Mashup Camp, which started with a presentation I gave at Mashup University about using our widget and sync API to smarten up your web site's address book. Several people have asked me for a copy of my slides from that talk, so here they are! (PPT, 1.7MB; also available as PDF, but you won't see the cool animations, heh!) For more info, be sure to check out our Plaxo developer pages at www.plaxo.com/api. I also ran a Mashup Camp sesison on aggregating profile data from across the web.
In addition to helping get the word out about Plaxo's resources for mashup developers, I met a lot of people at Mashup Camp that are working on exciting projects, including Danny Thorpe and Trevin Chow from Windows Live, Scott Isaacs of DHTML/Atlas fame (who has taught me a ton about web development over the years, but I'd never met), Kaliya Hamlin and Johannes Ernst, who are doing great work on user-centric identity (a problem that will become increasingly important for Plaxo users as people store more and more of their information on different sites across the Internet and want to collect and sync it all), Joe "Duck" Hunkins, who blogged most of Mashup University and Mashup Camp, and many more.
It's really energizing to see so many smart and passionate people working towards a common goal of making it easier for people to quickly build rich web experiences that can be used by anybody. We're proud to be contributing our own little piece to this noble cause!
--Joseph Smarr
PS: Fore more coverage of Mashup Camp, check out the wiki pages for the Mashup Camp sessions, the flickr photos, blog posts, and the Mercury News article.
In our continuing quest to save the world from not-another-disconnected-address-book-itis, I'm presenting a talk at Mashup University this Tuesday, July 11th, at 11:30am at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I'll demonstrate how to use Plaxo's Address Book Access Widget and REST-ful Sync API to enable your site to give its users access to their existing address book (wherever it may be), as well as explain some of the technical challenges Plaxo dealt with while creating these mashups.
MashupU will be followed by Mashup Camp 2, which many of us at Plaxo will be attending, including Mark Jen and our founders Todd & Cam. Apparently MashupU has filled up its 150 available attendee slots and MashupCamp has closed registration at 400+ seats! So if you're coming to either of these, please stop by and say hi, and if you couldn't make it, don't worry, we'll post a wrap-up when it's all done.
Here's the description of the talk:
Nearly all new web applications have a strong social component: sharing content with your friends, growing by invitation, and building reputations and ratings. Unfortunately, this means that many services are asking their users to build and maintain yet-another-address-book on each site they visit. As a result, these address books are usually incomplete and quickly become out-of-date, which is bad for both the sites and their users. Plaxo has built a “smart address book” that automatically stays in sync with the address books members already use—including Outlook, Mac, Thunderbird, AIM, and Yahoo. A few lines of JavaScript is all it takes to create a Plaxo mashup that lets people import and select contacts to be added in to their address books at any web site or application. Sites wishing for an even more integrated experience can implement Plaxo’s full REST-based sync and access APIs. In this session, we’ll talk about how to take advantage of Plaxo’s widgets and APIs, and I’ll discuss some of the underlying technology that makes these mashups possible.
UPDATE: I've posted my slides from the talk.
I just got back from being on a panel at Supernova entitled, “The Personal Infosphere.” The panel was moderated by Jeff Clavier, (SoftTech VC), and included Dalton Caldwell (imeem), Yael Elish (eSnips), Hans Peter Brondmo (Plum), and Tariq Krim (Netvibes).
The format included ~6 minutes of introductions/product demos, and then we dove deep into the discussion. Since most of the other panelists run businesses driven by user creation of rich media and the associated broad sharing and categorization of that media, we had some interesting debates related to:
- The relative value of social filtering (e.g. recommendations from people you know) vs. more collaborative filtering (i.e. relying on the wisdom of crowds to derive implicit recommendations/rankings)
- The ways in which the relatively unstructured modes of communication and sharing popular in consumer applications can get translated into a more structured enterprise environment
- Privacy and copyright issues
- Whether a lot of these sites are just creating new information silos, rather than promoting broad sharing and discoverability
All in all, a very interesting panel, although we studiously avoided any discussion of such mundane matters as business models or the applicability of some of these services in the broader marketplace. Plaxo was somewhat of an outlier in terms of the nature of the content we provide, maturity of the company and business model, users base, etc.
Dan Farber just posted an interesting write up of the panel.
Were you at the panel? Any thoughts?
Also, just a reminder that our own John McCrea will be on a panel at Supernova on Friday called Who Owns "You"?.
