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 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!

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.

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

Happy Halloween from all of us at Plaxo!

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 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:

Good news for my fellow Netflix fans: you can now easily share your Netflix ratings as a feed in Pulse! As always, you can choose whether to share your ratings with your family, friends, business contacts, and/or within custom groups, and you'll start seeing ratings from people you know if they share them with you. Opinions on movies and TV shows are a common and natural starting point for discussions, so we expect to see long and heated comment threads starting from these shared reviews. And the best part is, it's so easy to rate movies as part of being a Netflix subscriber that you'll be able to start these discussions just by hooking up the tools you already use--no need to re-rate the movies in Plaxo or anywhere else, just connect your Netflix account. That's the power of giving users control over their data--everybody wins here. If you're a Netflix subscriber, go connect your Netflix account now!

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.

As you may be aware, the Plaxo Pulse service is in the midst of a temporary outage. We are working hard to restore the service as quickly as possible. The outage was caused by a series of power outages (followed by massive surges) at the data center that hosts our services.

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.

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 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

“Going Dutch” usually means splitting the restaurant bill to share the cost, rather than having one person pick up the whole tab. You can think of it as a participatory experience, where everyone contributes to and shares equally in the fun.

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

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