It's hard to believe that it has only been a year that Pulse has been in existence. But as Pete's launch post attests, we rolled Pulse out to the world on August 5 of last year. Since then, it's been a mad dash of weekly releases to build out the feature set as rapidly as possible.

We've been really pleased with the great market reception for Pulse. Previously, we've talked about (first post and second post) how rapidly the "social graph" was getting wired together, aided by strong response to our Open initiatives and our innovative model of family/friend/business relationship categories. And that connecting up has actually accelerated in recent months, bringing total number of bi-directional connections to over 17 million!

Of course, that's not the most common metric for measuring success of a social network. More typically, one looks at the number of monthly unique visitors. Today, Compete just released the numbers for July, and while any traffic measurement system is imperfect (especially when a service offers client-based access options), this is a much followed source of traffic trends. They show a whopping 225% year-over-year growth in monthly unique visitors -- and 21% growth from June to July! Go, Pulse, go!

Of course, the specific numbers here are not really important; the trendline is what matters. Why? Well, Compete looks only at U.S. traffic, and Plaxo has a really large and growing international user base. In fact, we get almost half of our traffic from outside the U.S, so the Compete numbers certainly are undercounting our total.

But, hey, it's a birthday party. Let's not quibble. Pulse may only be twelve months old, but we're proud and excited to see how rapidly it's growing. (Check out how fast it's rising in rank.) Here's to accelerating growth in Pulse's second year!

John McCrea
VP of Marketing

In my mind that's also how Plaxo users in the Netherlands relate to our service. They participate. And participate. And participate.
The Netherlands – representing our third largest user base (after the U.S. and the U.K.) – ranks second in pageviews and first in the world in number of Pulse connections per user. That’s what I call participating and sharing!

We at Plaxo felt we had to do our part in the sharing too. Last week we released a Dutch version of the Plaxo service, including our networked address book, online calendar, and next-generation social network, Pulse. Users can also download our connector for data sync with Microsoft Outlook. The connector for the Mac Address Book will be available soon. You can take a peek at Dutch Pulse and Address Book screens here.

By “Going Dutch”, we want to express how delighted we are with the way Pulse took off in the Netherlands – and, perhaps, accelerate our already high growth rate there.

Regina Bustamante
Director, Globalization

Suffice it to say, we are more excited than ever about what this transition will mean for employees, partners, and…most importantly…Plaxo’s customers around the world. Once again, our heartfelt thanks to everyone who supported Plaxo in reaching this stage. The best is yet to come.

Ben Golub
CEO, Plaxo

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

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.

This is another great move from Yahoo!, who has been showing real leadership in the area of data portability and opening up the Social Web. It follows on the heels of Yahoo! becoming an OpenID provider. (We were glad to be a launch partner for that, too.)

The next phase of the Web will be enabled by empowering users with control over their data, and the ability to let them use within the tools, services, and devices they choose. The Yahoo! Address Book API is a great step in that direction, giving users access to their address book data – and without having to give up their username and password to a third-party site. (And we're particularly excited to see Yahoo's continued commitment to supporting open standards; sounds like OAuth support is on the way!)

If you’re a Plaxo user and want to set up (or re-activate) sync with Yahoo!, here’s a post with the instructions.

Joseph Smarr
Chief Platform Architect

http://www.plaxo.com/po3/?module=dashboard&operation=addSync&cid=Yahoo

And if you had this feature turned on at some time in the past, you can now re-activate that sync point. Just follow this simple process:

Step 1: Login into Plaxo and bring up your address book.

Step 2: Click on your Yahoo endpoint to initiate the re-authentication process.

A window will pop up where you can sign in to Yahoo, accept their terms of service, and authorize Plaxo to access your address book.

Step 3: Once the re-authentication process is completed, then you can trigger synchronization to Yahoo. Click on “Manage” to bring up the options lightbox.

Step 4: Inside the light box, click “Sync Now”.

If you have hundreds of contacts being synced from Plaxo to Yahoo, be aware that is can take up to twenty four hours before seeing your contacts appear in Yahoo for the first-time sync.

For everyone who has been eagerly awaiting for the return of this feature, thanks so much for your patience. I think you'll be pleased with the result, as the new Yahoo Address Book API will make sync a much more robust offering.

And of course, we're still not done. We're working harder than ever on new features to bring your address book to life.

--Mark Hashimoto, Server Engineer (and honorary technical yahoo by now!)

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

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

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

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

Hong Kwon
Product Manager

The short answer is that the same privacy protections that you have now will remain in place after the acquisition closes. Plaxo will remain as an independent subsidiary of Comcast, with all of the current management team (I will continue to serve as Plaxo’s Chief Privacy Officer). The Plaxo privacy policy is a legally-binding document which limits how your data may be used; it is also legally binding upon anyone who acquires Plaxo. This policy will remain in force following the acquisition and any data you have provided Plaxo will continue to be covered.

The privacy policy explicitly states that following a business transition (e.g. an acquisition) your information will continue to only be used in the manner specified by the privacy policy in effect at the time when that data was collected. If Plaxo wants to use your data in a different manner we are required to notify you as to the change; you will have a choice as to whether your data may be used in this manner. You will continue to have the ability to control your communications preferences (i.e. you can opt-out of receiving any promotional offers) and you will retain the ownership of your data, as well as the ability to delete your data at any time.

Many of us take for granted the words written in the privacy policies of the websites we visit. But I do encourage you to read ours here so that you can see the choices and empowerment we provide our users. You can also read more about what this acquisition means to you, as written by an independent watchdog group, TRUSTe. For the past several years, both Plaxo and Comcast have voluntarily agreed to have TrustE review their privacy practices for compliance. TRUSTe also provides a free service to our users to mediate any disputes involving their privacy rights and data.

Although Plaxo will be a Comcast subsidiary, we will remain independent - having our own privacy policy, keeping the same management and employees, and continuing the evolution of the address book. The acquisition does not change the Plaxo you already know, except that we look forward to providing more services and features for our users. By becoming a part of Comcast, we believe that we can make our services significantly better for all of our users.

We hope that you will continue to enjoy the services you’re getting from Plaxo, and we intend to keep making them better. But if at any time you no longer wish to be a member of the Plaxo network, you can delete your account at any time – and delete the personal data you have entrusted to us.

If you have any questions, concerns or feedbacks, please feel free to contact me at redgee @t plaxo.com or visit the Privacy and Security section in our community forums and join a public discussion – I’ll see you there.

Redgee Capili
Sr. Director Client Services &
Chief Privacy Officer

Big doings at Plaxo today! We are really excited to announce some of the biggest news in the history of Plaxo: We have just signed an agreement** to be acquired by Comcast, the nation's leading provider of entertainment, information and communications products and services (and our largest customer and partner).

Joining forces with Comcast is a real win for our customers, our investors, and our employees. Comcast has an exciting vision to bring the social media experience to mainstream consumers. Together, we will be able to help users connect with all the people they care about, across all of the devices they use, with all the media they love to consume, create, and share. This is also great news for the Internet industry at large, where Plaxo has been – and will continue to be – a strong advocate for opening up the Social Web.

Plaxo will remain an independent operation in Silicon Valley, reporting into Comcast Interactive Media, which is a division of Comcast that develops and operates Internet businesses focused on entertainment, information and communication. All of our 50 employees will continue to innovate on and grow both our networked address book service and our next-generation social network, Pulse. And through additional integration projects with Comcast, we’ll be able to take these services to a lot more users and places than we could on our own. We are developing an exciting roadmap with Comcast that includes socially enabling the media experience in places such as Comcast’s high traffic portal (Comcast.net),CIM’s popular interactive entertainment properties (such as Fancast and Fandango), and the television

Plaxo and Comcast have been working together for the past year on a number of initiatives. Plaxo is providing the universal address book for Comcast’s SmartZone communications center (slated to launch later this year), and we are also now hosting all of the address book accounts for Comcast webmail users. Our partnership has already more than doubled the reach of the Plaxo network, bringing the total number of accounts to nearly 50 million.

Together, we intend to deliver on a vision of making “social media” a natural part of the lives of regular people, not just early-adopters. For example, you should be able to securely post family photos online in Pulse, and have them viewable by any of your family members, whether they are online, at work, on their mobile device, or in their living room watching TV. And you should be able to discover new shows to watch, based on what your friends and coworkers have recommended.

So, what about current Plaxo members? The services you know and enjoy from Plaxo will not only continue, but will continue to evolve and improve. In addition, both of our services benefit from “network effect,” which is to say that the more people who use them, the more useful they become.

Continued Protection of Your Privacy and Support for Interoperability
Plaxo has always been a strong advocate of giving users ownership and control of their data. We protect our users’ data with one of the strongest privacy policies, which will continue. We will continue to work toward greater interoperability and data portability, with the user at the center and in control. Comcast has a similarly strong privacy policy, and we are both committed to ensuring that the protections users have come to expect will continue.

In Conclusion
Finally, we’d like to extend an enormous thanks to the people who have helped Plaxo reach this point—our millions of loyal customers, our patient investors and advisors, and the extraordinarily talented group of employees who have worked so hard to bring us to this point.

So, whether you’ve been a part of the Plaxo network for a long time, joined recently for Pulse, or have just followed us from the sidelines, we appreciate your interest in the Plaxo story. We are excited to open a new chapter today.

Ben Golub, CEO
Cameron Ring, Founder and Chief Architect
Todd Masonis, Founder and Vice President of Products

** We are not releasing financial details of the transaction. The acquisition is subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals, and is expected to close in the near future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

John McCrea
VP of Marketing

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.

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

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

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

John McCrea
VP of Marketing

So, I thought it was time for an update. The original chart showed a dramatic change in the rate at which the Pulse social graph was wiring itself up -– a "Great Inflection" point exactly coincident with the announcement of Google’s OpenSocial initiative on October 30, 2007. The biggest question raised by many at the time was, “Is that a sustainable change of slope or just a temporary PR-driven surge?” That question is even more relevant today, as we now know the OpenSocial story has taken a few months of development to solidify, and that we are just now starting to see full rollout on sites like MySpace. (We’re planning our own rollout in Q2.)

Well, I am pleased to announce that the trend that got kick-started with a PR surge did, indeed, end up sustaining. People liked what they saw when they came to Pulse, and the pace of establishing family, friend, and business connections has held remarkably steady. Here’s the latest Pulse social graph “hockeystick” chart, showing a continued meteoric rise from just 1 million connections in early November to over 7 million connections as of last week!

And, to be clear, these 7 million-plus connections are a new breed, an alternative to the model that forces all relationships to be described as “friends”. Every single connection in Pulse has a category, such as family, friend, or business. It’s what we think of as a “true social graph,” built up from the real who-you-know foundation of users’ unified address books. So, here’s a first peek at what happens when you give users a permission model for selectively sharing content, based on category of relationship:

When you give users choice in this area, the social graph that emerges begins to look like the real world. That is the real world of our demographic, which is the post-college crowd, centered on the 25 to 55 year olds. For that crowd, the largest slice of the pie derives from interactions out in the world: the set of people they currently work with, or worked with in the past, accounting for 75% of all connections. It is also interesting to note that when people have choices other than "friend," the word friend gets back its meaning; here we see just 20% of connections being labeled as real friends. And the group that for many is the most important, is by definition, the smallest – your family, representing here just 3% of the total connections.

We really believe that we are on the cusp of the next major phase of the Internet, a phase we call the “Social Web.” We are thrilled to see the major players actively working together on issues of data portability, implementing support for OpenID (Yahoo!) and microformats, coming together on application portability via OpenSocial, and creating innovative building blocks, like Google’s Social Graph API. We have been encouraged by the groundswell of support for the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web and for the concepts of data portability, in general.

For example, ReadWriteWeb, an influential blog, recently wrote:

“Securely moving your data around the web has increasingly become an important concept on the web. Arguably, it was the most discussed meme at this year's SXSW. While not an application, you could say it has been 'this year's Twitter'."

And here's a relevant video clip, featuring Joseph Smarr on the Portable Social Networks panel at SXSW, addressing the notion that open grows the pie; that this is not a zero-sum game:

Also, if you haven’t see Forrester analyst Charlene Li’s presentation at the recent Graphing Social Patterns conference, I highly recommend taking at look. The slides she used are here. Her thesis is that “social” will become such a natural part of the open Web, that social networking will become “like air.”

In other words, “open” is not just good for business – it is the natural way of the Web. And it's proving to be the case that the "air" Charlene talks about is wind in our sails.

John McCrea
vp of marketing

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.