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Google Friend Connect: Making your Plaxo account Useful all over the Social WebYesterday

You may have seen the news today that Google Friend Connect is now available to all sites. The official announcement over at Google describes the details:

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

Yahoo Ups the Ante for OpenID with Profile PortabilityNovember 20

Yahoo has been working fast and furious to help their users take their Yahoo account with them across the web using open standards. Today they've released a limited test of a major enhancement to their OpenID provider: when you sign up for Plaxo with your Yahoo ID, you can now opt-in to sharing your Yahoo! profile data--full name, nickname, e-mail address, gender, language, and timezone--almost everything you need to get up and running with Plaxo or most other services. (During this limited test roll-out, sharing of profile data will be available to a few sites, including Plaxo and Jyte.) Best of all, we can now auto-validate your Yahoo! e-mail address (since it's coming from Yahoo!), rather than having to send you one of those e-mail messages to click and confirm you really own it. Yahoo! thus joins Google in their ability to provide an auto-validated email address during sign up, but they've now gone further than any major OpenID provider by also sharing the rest of the profile data. This is a great step forward for Yahoo, relying parties like Plaxo, and the Open Web--congrats are certainly in order!

This announcement comes on the heels of Yahoo's pioneering usabilit

Socializing Plaxo eCardsNovember 5

We’ve been working hard the past few months to bring the social benefits of Pulse to Plaxo eCards. Now with our latest release, you can:

• Send social eCards. When you are sending a Plaxo eCard, you have the option to mark it “social”, allowing your recipient’s connections to see your sent eCard and add their comments. For example, let’s say that your friend Trevor has achieved a major accomplishment. You can send Trevor a congratulations eCard and allow his connections to see it. This helps them discover Trevor’s accomplishment so they can congratulate him, as well. Of course, if you only want Trevor (and no one else) to see your eCard, you can mark it “private”.

• 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.

Happy Halloween!October 31

Happy Halloween from all of us at Plaxo!

Google becomes an OpenID Provider -- try it now on PlaxoOctober 29

Another major victory for the Open Web: today Google has become an OpenID provider. This means you can now sign into sites like Plaxo with your existing Google Account, removing the need to remember separate passwords on each site you use. Obviously with a site as large and mainstream as Google supporting OpenID--in the company now of Yahoo, AOL, and (as of Monday) Microsoft--this will have a major impact on the web.

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 y