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An inside look at all things Plaxo

Yahoo Ups the Ante for OpenID with Profile PortabilityNovember 21 2008

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

Google becomes an OpenID Provider -- try it now on PlaxoOctober 29 2008

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

Portable Contacts is now Plaxo's primary APISeptember 18 2008

The Social Web is opening up, and services large and small are increasingly using a common set of open "building blocks" to integrate with the rest of the web. As many know, at Plaxo we think this is a great thing for users. for developers, and for our business. We've been early adopters and evangelists for several of these building blocks, including OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and microformats. And recently we've also helped lead the charge to build another key piece of the "open stack": a common API standard for accessing address book, profile, and friends-list data called "Portable Contacts".

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

Now the Deal is Closed: Plaxo has Become a Business Unit of Comcast Interactive MediaJuly 2 2008

It’s official! Plaxo and Comcast have received all necessary approvals and have exchanged all necessary paperwork. As of today, Plaxo is officially part of Comcast Interactive Media. We outlined most of the rationale for joining forces in the blog post we wrote at the time we signed the definitive agreement. In the intervening month and a half, we’ve been working closely with Comcast on more detailed plans to make the social media vision a reality.

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

Gnip launches and Plaxo's pulse is racingJuly 2 2008

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