Today, together with our friends at Facebook, we are excited to deliver on that promise, with the roll out of an integration of Facebook Connect that demonstrates an unprecedented level of interoperability between two social networks (while preserving fine-grained control of privacy).

For this first phase of our integration of Facebook Connect, we focused not on new user signup, but on making something that would rock for the millions of people who are already happy users of both Plaxo and Facebook. (In a recent survey of our most active users, we found that 60% of them were also active on Facebook – and they wished the two services would just work together.)

So what did we do for this large and growing core?

First, we decided to put an end to “Re-Friend Madness”.
Starting today, we will honor Facebook friendships on Plaxo (for anyone who wants us to). That means that you can leverage the friends list you’ve built up on Facebook to help you get more connected on Plaxo – without having to manually re-friend those people, one-at-a-time.

Second, we’re enabling two-way flows of content between the two services, leveraging new capabilities of the Facebook Platform
Now, you can feed the content you’re sharing on Facebook (such as photos, videos, links, and events) over to Plaxo for sharing to your friends here. In addition, you can sync your status updates between the two services (in either or both directions). And, when you share a link or post a review in Plaxo, you can also share it over to your friends on Facebook.

If that sounds good, you can activate Facebook Connect for your Plaxo account now.

Achieving this level of interoperability was not easy. It required lots of collaborative problem-solving between the teams at Plaxo and Facebook. From concept to launch, we were really impressed with the Facebook team’s unwavering focus on doing the right thing for the user and creating the best possible user experience.

We’re really excited about this integration. We think it’s going to be really good for our business and really good for Facebook’s business. More importantly, it’s going to be great for users.

What we’re launching today is really just the beginning. Soon, we’ll add the ability to sign up and sign in to Plaxo via Facebook Connect. And we’ll continue to collaborate with the team at Facebook on additional ways we can make our two services work well together.

We believe this is an historic day, one that marks the beginning of a new era for the Internet, characterized by an open and interoperable Social Web.

John McCrea and Joseph Smarr

“Crowdsourcing” of tasks which were previously performed by a pre-defined group of people has been a rather popular offshoot of web 2.0 collaboration capabilities. But for social networking services like Plaxo, crowdsourcing takes a different meaning -- it follows naturally from the social identity of the site, and might be better called “membersourcing”. After all, who can better render a social application into another language than the users themselves?

The Plaxo translation portal was developed in the same framework as the Plaxo site. Users not only share content (translations) but can also comment or “vote” on other people's contributions. In the end the best voted translations “win” and get pushed to the site.

So, in a sense, this version of Plaxo belongs to our Italian members. It crowns a year of triple digit growth for Plaxo in Italy --- not only in new users but also in pageviews and visitors coming to our site through search.

If you have been using Plaxo in English and want to change your language to Italian, click on Settings in the upper right corner of your screen, select Italian from the language menu and save your new preferences.

Or if you are not a member yet, but like our “storia italiana” and want to be a part of Italian Plaxo, go to:

http://www.plaxo.com/italian

Enjoy!

Regina Bustamante
Director, Globalization

That bet has paid off big time, driving triple-digit growth for Plaxo, and with feed sharing and stream aggregation becoming the blueprint for the future for startups, major social networks, Internet giants, and mainstream media sites, alike. But we think this is still just the beginning, and we’re excited about innovating further on this new web-wide platform. As the first of a series of enhancements in the works, today we’re rolling out two powerful new features to give everyone a “stronger Pulse”: Comments-in-the-Stream and deep integration with the travel itinerary site TripIt.

Comments-in-the-Stream

Of course, one of the main benefits of aggregating Activity Streams from all over the web is that it simplifies staying up-to-date on what's going on in the lives of the people you know and care about. Even better, the most interesting nuggets of content, whether that’s vacation photos your friend shared on Flickr, a book your brother reviewed on GoodReads, or a movie your coworker rated on Netflix, are the natural seeds for private conversations. With today’s release, we make those conversations a more central feature of the service, bringing them front-and-center in the stream, rather than only on the details page of the shared event.

Deep Integration with TripIt; unleashing the power of "private feeds"

Since we’re interested in unlocking the value of private conversations, we’re obviously thinking about sharing as a private activity. Ironically, we got Pulse started by aggregating public feeds (and layering on a family/friends/business permission model inside Plaxo). We did that because that was what was available at the time, and because we believed that over time feeds would go mainstream and that mechanisms would emerge for getting access to private feeds. And, indeed, that has been the case, with the accelerating adoption of OAuth. Plaxo members can now take a feed of what they are privately sharing on Netflix, Picasa, and Twitter and share that selectively into Plaxo just with family, friends, colleagues, a group (or any combination of those).

Today, we add to the list of private feed sources the online travel itinerary site, TripIt, via a deep integration with their recently released Open Travel Itinerary API. Now you can share your travel plans with whatever subset of your Plaxo connections makes sense to you.

They’ll see your trips in their Pulse stream (and so will you). As with other feeds, we’ve done some custom work to make the events more detailed and engaging, including images and destination specifics (such as the event: “SXSW Interactive”). And when looking at your own TripIt events in your stream, you’ll also see a link to the full itinerary on TripIt.com.

But that’s not all! We’ve also integrated this with the Plaxo calendar, so you can see your itineraries as events in relationship to your other time commitments.

We believe this integration shows some of the great promise of what activity streams can enable. Joseph Smarr was able to crank this out really quickly, because it combined two of his great passions (OAuth and TripIt), because open standards allow re-use of code and knowledge, and because he had the agile support of TripIt. Andy Denmark and the rest of the TripIt team were great partners in the development process, taking feedback and making tweaks to the API.

To hook up your TripIt feed, go here.

This is a really exciting time in the industry, as the Web goes social, and the Social Web goes open. We've got a lot of great things coming...stay tuned. :)

John McCrea
vp of marketing

But, of course, we are well aware that most companies out there are in a different position, and that our members are confronting a deepening recession, rising unemployment, and decreasing job security. It is that sobering reality that inspired us to come up with a better way to connect job seekers with career opportunities, working together with Simply Hired, the largest job search engine, to introduce “social job listings” on Plaxo.

For users in the U.S., we’ve rolled out a new Jobs section on Plaxo, where hiring managers and recruiters can post new job listings, and where job seekers can browse or search postings from across the Simply Hired network. But jobs posted on Plaxo aren’t like job listings anywhere else; job listings on Plaxo are turbo-charged with the “social power” of your extended network.

Social Job Listings
When you post a job to Plaxo, you have the option of sharing it to any or all of your Plaxo network. For example, you might choose to share the listing to your business connections and to one or two groups that you’re a member of. Or you might share it to your friends and your business network. Or for that matter, you might also share it with your family, if you have family members who might be able to help source candidates! Oh, and of course, your can share it via email with anyone, whether they’re a Plaxo member or not.

On Plaxo, the listing is then like any other shared event in the Plaxo stream, which means you and the people who receive it can comment on it, and anyone who receives it can re-share it to their networks!

And what happens when that social job listing finds its way to someone who wants to apply for the opening? At Plaxo, we’re all about openness and user control. So, as with other user-shared content, we view this as your job listing, not ours. And that means that we don’t get in the middle of communications between you and potential applicants. They can respond to you directly via email. 

Of course, this is just a first release. We’ll be measuring results, monitoring feedback, and looking for more ways to innovate at the intersection of “social” and job listings. Oh, and we’re currently offering a limited-time launch promotion, with a 25% discount on any posting.

John McCrea
VP of Marketing

Our first live test takes an innovative “hybrid approach,” bringing together three discrete technologies into a unified experience: OpenID for sign-on; OAuth for delegated authorization; and the Google Contacts API for secure import of the user’s address book. Of course, that’s all “under the hood;” the user certainly doesn’t need to have understanding (or even awareness) of these enabling technologies – no matter how cool we think they are. ;)

The goal of the Two-Click Signup initiative is simple: deliver a new user onboarding experience based on the “Open Stack” that is strictly better for all parties than traditional registration flows. And that means we want to achieve something that it is:

- better for the user by being more convenient and more secure;
- better for the identity provider by not asking the user for their password and then scraping their data; and
- better for the site by delivering a higher conversion rate on signup flows and getting more useful data from the user.

In this first test with Google, we’re experimenting with an optimized flow that starts with the invitation from a Plaxo member to a non-member via Gmail. Because we know the invitee is a Google user and is quite likely to be signed in to Google at the time they click over to Plaxo from the invitation, we can present them a “Google-optimized landing page” like this:

From there, it’s just two clicks to become a registered user of Plaxo. The first click takes them back to a Google consent page that looks like this:

The second click lets the person, if they choose, do two things: agree to use their Google account for signing in to Plaxo, and tell Google they grant Plaxo permission to access their email address and Gmail contacts. That allows us to get their address book started and to help them find the people they know on Plaxo. (Of course, if they choose not to use their Google credentials to signup, they can, of course, click over to our standard registration flow instead.)

[Please note: At this time, this is a test that will be seen by only a subset of Gmail invitees. Depending upon results, we may turn that percentage up or down or even suspend the test temporarily.]

We think this is a great start, but there’s a lot more work ahead. We need to monitor the results and then iterate rapidly, based on the data. And we need to follow-on with experiments with other identity providers, including not only other other webmail providers, but also with social networks. As with all things open, we’ll share what we learn along the way. After all, this isn’t just about improving OpenID for users of Plaxo and Google; it's about enabling user-controlled data portability and interoperability across the emerging Social Web.

John McCrea
vp of marketing

Well, good news for all the good readers out there: goodreads is now integrated into Plaxo, making it easy to rate, review, and share the books that you've been reading. If you're new to goodreads, signing up is a cinch, and you can then hook up your goodreads feed to Plaxo so all of your reviews will be shared automatically. As always, you choose who gets to see your reviews--maybe you want them to be public, or maybe you just want your friends and family to see them. And since every shared review has its own comment thread, discussions are bound to break out; after all, everyone has an opinion on what makes a good book!

Example goodreads review shared in Plaxo

So give goodreads a try and let us know what you think about all the books you've been reading. And who knows, you might just find a good suggestion or two for your next book to read!

We're pleased to share that Google Friend Connect is now available in beta to any webmaster looking to add a 'dash of social' to his or her site. This service lets webmasters add social features to their sites by simply copying and pasting a few snippets of code — no advanced coding or technical background required.

We know that people want to be social on the web, and Friend Connect makes it easy for anyone to sign in to a website, share a little bit about themselves through a personal profile, discover other people with similar interests, invite their contacts, and interact with friends. Even better, you don't have to deal with the hassle of creating yet another username and password — Friend Connect lets you log in using an existing account from Google, Yahoo, AOL, or OpenID. Similarly, you can choose to either establish a new profile or use profiles and friend sources from other social networks that have opened up their services, like Plaxo and orkut.

We're thrilled to be a part of this ambitious project, and we think this is great for Plaxo members. Now, you can visit any Google Friend Connect enabled site and in just a few clicks be signed up, signed in, with your Plaxo profile photo, and access to your friends. And if you elect to "Share your activities on this site to other users and friends," your activity stream from that site will get shared back into Plaxo.
We are in the early phases of a major transformation of the Web, leaving behind the "walled garden" era of social networking, and looking forward to the arrival of the Social Web. Our goal is to make Plaxo a service that is useful to you all over the Social Web, and today we just took an important step forward on that pathway.

For a bit more context and some screenshots, check out my post on TheRealMcCrea, that puts this in the context of other news of the day. Also see Joseph Smarr's original post on this integration, when we first announced it in June.

John McCrea
vp of marketing

This announcement comes on the heels of Yahoo's pioneering usability studies on OpenID, which they published for everyone to benefit from (they even went a step further by hosting an OpenID UX Summit on their campus). And Yahoo! is eating their own dogfood--they also recently streamlined and clarified their own OpenID flow. These guys are on a roll, and they've been great to work with!

At the recent Internet Identity Workshop--an biannual gathering of people working on OpenID and related technologies--the folks at Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, MySpace, and others were all very focused on "how can we make OpenID work better for mainstream users", and the clear consensus was to a) improve the UX, and b) share more data when signing up for a new site. Clearly a lot is happening already in the first category, and Yahoo!'s announcement today marks some serious progress in the second one. The hot topic next is how to let users also seamlessly grant access to their address book or friends list--after all, so many sites today ask you to import your webmail address book to find connections and invite people to join. Technically this will be accomplished via a hybrid OpenID and OAuth protocol and Portable Contacts (Yahoo! today is using the "simple registration extension" to OpenID, which is ideal for transferring basic profile data, but insufficient for providing access to richer private data via APIs). We all made great progress on nailing down the details of this hybrid protocol while at IIW.

Given the excitement and eagerness of all the participants there, I think we can continue to expect more and more data to flow across the OpenID link, which will make it increasingly valuable for Relying Parties like Plaxo, and should incentivize many more sites to become RPs themselves. It's great to see this virtuous cycle in motion, and Plaxo is eager to work with any and all OpenID Providers who want to improve their UX and empower their users to use more of their data across the web!

PS: Here are some screen shots of 1) the "Sign in with your Yahoo! ID" option on Plaxo, 2) the consent page on Yahoo, where you can choose to also share your profile data, and 3) returning to Plaxo with a pre-filled registration page and no need to enter a Plaxo-specific password! Since this is a limited test, we're eager to hear your feedback both at Plaxo and Yahoo!, so if you haven't yet signed up for a Plaxo account, please give it a try and let us know what you think!

PPS: We also discussed this announcement in more detail on thesocialweb.tv -- check it out!

• See comments on your sent eCards. Your recipient(s) can add their comments after seeing your sent eCard online. You’ll then receive an email notification that will tell you where to go to see those comments.

• Keep track of your sent, received, and scheduled eCards. Can’t remember if you’ve already sent a birthday eCard to someone? Well, now you’ll be able to see what eCards you have already sent or have scheduled for future delivery. Also, you can view the various eCards on that you’ve received on www.plaxo.com so you can revisit the most memorable ones. You control which people have permission to see which eCards.

And with the latest enhancements, we will be able to add animated eCards to the continually growing catalog of Plaxo eCards. Stay tuned for updates!

Here's an example of a social eCard:

While all Plaxo eCards are now picked up online (instead of an email inbox), we hope you’ll agree that the new viewing approach provides a richer experience for the sender and recipient. Feel free to check out the eCards FAQ for more details.

Enjoy the new Plaxo eCards experience and let us know how we can make it even better for you!

John Yen
Director, Product Management

So starting today, you can now sign in to Plaxo (or sign up, if you're not yet a member) using your existing Google credentials. Just look for the "Sign in with a Google Account" link on our signin page.

This is also the foundation for secure data sharing between your Google account and the other services you use. In this first version, you can share your gmail e-mail address when you sign in to Plaxo. If you've already got that gmail address on your Plaxo account, we'll recognize you and sign you in automatically. And if you're signing up for a new Plaxo account, we'll pre-fill your gmail address in our registration, and we won't have to send you one of those e-mails asking you to confirm you really own it--since you already did by using OpenID! [Geek note: Google is using Attribute Exchange to send us the e-mail address, which I believe is one of the first mainstream uses of this OpenID extension!]

Going forward, we're hoping to see more data flow across that trusted link, including your address book and calendar (with your permission, of course). After all, that's what Plaxo's all about: keeping you connected by making the services you use work better together.

So go ahead and give it a try. You can also read Google's announcement. And Google's been doing a lot of research on how to improve the user experience for OpenID, so if you're interested in where this technology is headed, it's definitely worth checking out. John McCrea also provides some context on this announcement.

BTW, here's what you'll see before you sign into Plaxo using your Google account:

Netflix rating shared inside my Pulse stream.

Not only am I excited about this integration because I love Netflix and love talking about movies with my friends, but I think it's a great example of how you can use Pulse to share non-public data with a trusted subset of the people you know. My ratings aren't public like a lot of web 2.0 content we aggregate--and I don't really want everyone in the world to see them--but I definitely want to share them with people I'm close to, whether or not they use Netflix themselves. Traditionally that's been hard to do, and if you think about it, there's a ton of interesting data about my life and what I'm up to that fits this pattern: what books I'm reading, where I'm traveling, what products I'm buying, and so on. Public data is really only the tip of the iceberg, but without a rich social graph and a set of protocols for sharing non-public data between trusted services, there's been no good way to share this data just with the people you want. But now that we have the right building blocks, and mainstream services are starting to use them, I expect a lot more of this type of rich, non-public sharing to start taking place.

Which brings me to the third reason I'm so excited about this integration--and the reason we were able to build and release it literally within a few weeks of Netflix releasing their API--Netflix chose to build it with existing, open standards. Specifically, they're using OAuth to let users grant Plaxo access to their non-public data, and they're using protected ATOM feeds for the ratings (along with RESTful APIs for getting additional data). Since Plaxo already knows how to crawl ATOM feeds, and we already know how to take users through the OAuth flow, it was trivial for us for hook this all up (most of the work was done in a single afternoon of hacking!). Better yet--using OAuth makes the experience of connecting Netflix and Plaxo much easier (and more secure) for users. You just click "Connect my Netflix account", sign into Netflix inside their popup if needed (Plaxo never sees your Netflix password), and grant Plaxo permission to access your private data. Then presto, you're all done. Nothing to type in, and no copying and pasting cryptic URLs like some services require as a hacky way of sharing non-public data. If you're one of those sites--please provide an OAuth interface, your users and partners will thank you! :)

Step 1: Click "Connect my Netflix account".

Step 2: Grant Plaxo access in the Netflix popup.

Step 3: You're connected! Choose whom to share your ratings with.

Rest assured that your data has not been affected, and while Pulse is down, you can still access your address book and calender (online and through any sync points you have set up, such as Outlook or the Mac address book). Online access is available via these links for address book and for calendar.

We expect to have the Pulse service restored later today. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.

John McCrea
VP of Marketing

UPDATE (3:00pm Pacific): Our operations team has now restored the Plaxo Pulse service. Sorry again for any inconvenience.

Last week, MySpace hosted the first Portable Contacts Summit, where participants from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, Plaxo, JanRain, ShopIt, Skydeck, Chi.mp, and others came together to show off the work they'd done so far and discuss the remaining details to get to a final spec. I think it's fair to say that we were all blown away by how much progress we've made already, how energized all the players are to see this happen, and how close we are to seeing the vision of users empowered to take their profile and connections with them across the web becoming a reality.

In preparation for the Summit (and the Portable Contacts Hackathon hosted by SixApart the night before), fellow Plaxite Huy Nguyen and I built a full end-to-end Portable Contacts provider endpoint for Plaxo, as well as a vendor-neutral test harness that can show off the use of OAuth (including OAuth Discovery), XRDS-Simple, and Portable Contacts working together with any compliant service provider. We wanted to see if implementing the spec was really as easy as it should be, and also to provide some tools and examples to help jump start other implementations. It worked out great, and proved quite useful to others, so we decided to open it up for anyone that wants to jump in and start working on Portable Contacts themselves.

In fact, we've gone one step further. We've revamped Plaxo's developer section to focus primarily on the open building blocks we're using. Starting now, developers should consider OAuth and Portable Contacts the primary way to access profile, address book, and pulse connections data from Plaxo. The idea is simple: once you write code to work with Plaxo, you can use that exact same code on a variety of other sites. And if you've already integrated with one of those sites, you can start working with Plaxo right away. After all, one of the main drivers to create Portable Contacts was the pain developers face having to write custom, one-off API implementations against every site they deal with. So we think it's time to start living the good life, where common specs mean less writing code and more interoperability with more sites.

As the Portable Contact spec goes through its final tweaks, we'll keep our implementation up to date, and we'll cook up some more sample code, tutorials, and other things to help you work with these building blocks--on Plaxo, or any open site. We're not getting rid of our existing Plaxo-specific APIs (which also provide sync, calendar, and other functionality), so if you want to do a deeper integration specifically with Plaxo, let us know. But we think for most developers, working on the Open Stack will mean less time and effort to get up and running, and a better "bang for the buck". So if you're passionate about building services that live in the emerging Social Web ecosystem, we invite you to start playing with Portable Contacts on Plaxo, and as always, let us know what else we can do to help put users in control of their data!

--Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect

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