Plaxo recently launched a new 3.0 version that was more than just an AJAX face lift. Plaxo, once a notorious spammer, has grown beyond their core service of being the web’s address book. The new version not only synchronizes contact information, but also your information feeds, like Flickr, calendars, and adding new feeds every day through Plaxo Pulse. Today Plaxo is joining a host of other sites supporting the OpenID platform as their larger vision takes form, and it is becoming a hub instead of a directory.
Facebook has talked repeatedly about their “social graph” (computer science jargon for the data structure behind a social network). It’s the core of their platform, providing the context that makes their applications relevant to users. The only problem is that it’s still relatively closed off. Applications can exist within Facebook or outside through their API. Either way, Facebook still owns the users.
Plaxo is not a “social network” like Facebook, but cuts to the core of what makes a “social graph.” Plaxo has access to the contact information their 15 million users. This not only includes phone numbers and emails, but the connections between users that make up the links on the social graph.
Plaxo is not making this “social graph” a walled garden. They’re becoming the Switzerland of contact information and have been focusing on inter-operating with new services (Yahoo, MSN, AOL). The addition of OpenID lowers the friction of getting on the graph.
While not as exciting as Facebook, Plaxo is edging in their direction. Plaxo Pulse ties together disparate services from across the web unlike the news feed, which ties together only Facebook’s content. While Plaxo hasn’t launched a platform to a crowded hall of over-eager developers, they have quietly focused on linking to existing applications on the web. Currently the provide a single interface for syncing with the social feeds, email, contact, and calendaring applications business people care about. It’s no long stretch to see this developing into even deeper integration with more web applications.
And how exactly does any of that make them open source?
Just because OpenID has “Open” in its name?
Wow, you are a terrible writer. “Plaxo has access to the contact information of the over 15 million users they claim.” Some of your diction is terrible. Seriously, just because your involved in “web 2.0″ doesn’t mean you should write about it…
Wow, you are a terrible writer. “Plaxo has access to the contact information of the over 15 million users they claim.” Some of your diction is terrible. Seriously, just because your involved in “web 2.0″ doesn’t mean you should write about it…
Hehe….
I think what he means by open source is really that Plaxo is vendor neutral. They are in a good position to unify the infinitely spawning social networks out there by acting as a sync engine to help keep all profiles up to date. On the other end with pulse they are acting as a data consolidation engine so I can be kept up to date on activity of all my linked friends across my social networks. As social networks become more and more specialized and more and more numerous I see this becoming a killer app.
He could also mean that Plaxo gives you better access to the underlying relationships between other members of your network as you get some visibility into numerous social networks, not just one as with facebook apps.
In the Web2.0 world, any term can be construed to mean anything.
Web2.0 = User generated content, AJAX, green round corners – you pick.
Evil = Microsoft, revenue generating business, advertisement – you pick.
Open Source = Apps that you can actually see the source, apps by friendly startups with cool funky names, apps with the name Open in them – you pick.
Plaxo….has access to the contact information their 15 million users. This not only includes phone numbers and emails, but the connections between users that make up the links on the social graph.
And this is exactly why they so easily could become evil (yes I’ve heard their assurances that they’ll never ever misuse this information…)
Plaxo’s name is still mud in my contacts list.
Im confused, how does Open ID=Open Source?
lol, Open Source? Plaxo is a garden with as many walls as Facebook.
duncan: open source is more popular, and as plaxo has explained in the past, the ends justify the means. why not equate your recent feature add with something more popular? Beats calling it Open Cheney.
wow. Nick’s getting his ass kicked in the comments.
I’ll admit it stretches the idea of “Open Source”, but if Plaxo sticks to its word, it could be a platform for easily pushing and pulling your identity between applications, removing the ownership over the identity.
I thought OpenID is about identity of the users and Open source is about making the source code freely available to everybody. This post does seem to have these mixed up somehow.
social network that she open source ,what it’s mean ?
Maybe ConnetU was behind GPL. These guys hated facebook gangs. So, they are giving away real facebook source code.
MA: Nick sure is getting kicked. I learned my lesson a long time ago about that with what’s her name. Everybody needs to play nice.
Issue with Plaxo is, once a spammer, always a spammer (and I have a bit of an anti-spammy background).
I don’t and won’t trust them and never will. And when you are talking about giving sensitive info to a web service it all comes down to trust.
Our announcement today was about our continued support for the standards and practices that will enable an “open social web,” including OpenID and microformats. The Internet is the platform. You should have control of your identity, your personal information, and how it gets shared across the many sites and services of the web.
Here’s a link to Joseph’s post on our blog:
http://blog.pla..._is_now_op.html
Exactly because i received so many Plaxo spams in the past, I am careful not to use Plaxo’s “spam”ish features (i.e. I never send requests for update, etc.), but I do use it to sync address books and it works like a charm. They may eventually live down the spam reputation.
I won’t use Plaxo and anybody that supports people with a history of sp@mming is quite questionable in my book.
What’s up Nick? You seemed pretty legitimate till now.
I admit I’ve given Duncan some grief over minor stuff that I should probably apologize for but promoting Plaxo?
That’s sad.
“I’ll admit it stretches the idea of “Open Source””
Do you mean in a “hallucinatory we’ll forget what we thought of tomorrow” kind of way?
Or in a “details don’t bother me cause I’m into free association” kind of way?
[PS - didn't mean to turn spamming into an email address in my last comment.]
Mike, let’s have lunch sometime to talk about the issues of open identity systems. This piece is good because it’s important for your readers to be aware of the issues. But this is at the level of old industry news reporting, like PC Week or News.com — it lacks any insight into the significance of what Plaxo may be doing. A little understanding of the possibilities here, now, could make a big difference.
“To be effective, journalists must be trusted by readers” – basic journalism ethics. I’m a bit disgusted that TechCrunch’s stance has gone from stiffly opposing Plaxo and their policies to now getting in bed with them – and adding insult to injury by calling them ‘Open’. What kind of operation are you running here?
Any company that bases its growth on disingenuous tactics cannot be trusted. Despite the assertion that their privacy practices are rock solid, I can’t help but feel any guarantees from this company are basically ‘hot air’.
I’m a bit surprised at the stubbornness of the techcrunch community. To dismiss a technology that is so useful because of past behavior is just silly. Plaxo was a spammer, the community spoke, plaxo stopped. It has been well over a year since I have gotten a single piece of email from plaxo besides birthday alerts. I’m glad techcrunch is enlightened enough to see this and give me news on a useful service.
If you think plaxo isn’t open, well you can get at any of your data through the API, that seems pretty open to me. On top of that plaxo3 beta uses open standards (syncml, etc) so that seems pretty open too..
Nick your next article better kill it – or you could be pounding the pavement…
– even mike chimed in
Good to see some debate amongst the TC crew.
Open source is a whole different beast to open ID, the thought processes and evalengical zeal found in the OS community is poles apart from open ID. That said, this is a highly relevant discussion as we all continue to play with the concept of a truly open soc net.
I keep thinking that “many to many” trumps “many to one” or “one to many” and this can be applied in the context of socnets and socnet apps — developing many apps/sconets for many socnets/apps may just be the most appropriate path to take.
I am interested in considered thoughts on this.
I tried Plaxo once, perhaps 8 months ago when it was offered as I installed AOL’s AIM. Didn’t like it, removed it, will wait to hear more before reinstalling.
DW is right, what Plaxo is trying to do is signficant. However, like MSFT with Passport, they lack the cred to do it.
Passport was a vendor solution. OpenID is an open standard. It is a decentralized single-sign on system. Plaxo is merely endorsing and implementing that open standard, and accepting it as a valid way to create or access an account with our service. With microformats, we are giving our uses a way to surface some of their contact or calendar data in a way that it can easily be consumed by another service that they want to have it consumed by.
Fundamentally, we are putting actions behind our words, actions that are in support of a user-centric view, in an open social web.
And, as many have noted, this is a very interesting and important discussion.
To Dave Winer, I saw you posts and your invitation to the Plaxo team to dive into more details. Would love to have that discussion. To you (and to anyone else interested), please feel free to contact me directly. I’m john@plaxo.com.
BTW – I don’t see Plaxo here:
https://www.myo...d.com/directory
And what does this mean for existing Plaxo users? How do I relate my existing Plaxo account to my existing OpenID.. um… ID?
NM – it’s:
Settings->Plaxo Identities->Manage Your OpenID’s
Please, feel free to question my thoughts and opinions, but my integrity hasn’t changed.
I’m suffering from social network fatique. Sounds like a very long stretch to see this one gaining widespread adoption. Anyone remember Microsoft Passport? Need Custom Software Development?
Mr. Gonzalez,
While your intentions are most likely noble, it -is- hard to forget the past.
As many have pointed out, and many more to come I’m sure, the very name Plaxo sends shivers down the spines of those that have been abused in the past by this company’s questionable actions. Sure, they have responded to these accusations by stating that the end justifies the means – but is that someone that we really want to be associating with?
I’m sure you have your reasons… and I’m only sorry that you’re one of the few that have shown support for Plaxo, but I know that I can not forget. If they’ve done it once, they can do it again and I’m not about to let a company take it upon themselves to spam my family, my friends, and my business associates.
Perhaps it is possible for Plaxo to turn their image around. For their users’ peace of mind I hope so, otherwise membership will be so low that once again we will find our inboxes stuffed with unsolicited requests.
I must admit that the rationale is credible when in terms of the contact details of each user that can be social knit to spawn a community and more. Here plaxo does have an advantage. However their spam background is the fear factor that has kept me away so far. Now when do we get to see social communities around our “live” contacts, our routine life? Nokia & Yahoo (covered in tech crunch already) and at next web i heard that Zyb is trying to do something similar. Its about time a simple effort matures in to something useful.
i don’t see any references in the article to open source – has the article been updated without a disclaimer, or am i missing something?
damn, what is with all you haters piling on Nick?!?
ok, so maybe it’s a stretch to call Plaxo “open”, however i’d agree they are a modestly legitimate source of a large group of social networking info, and indeed the 3.0 rev + the sync with multiple providers is a big step forward.
don’t know if i’m ready to tap them as an alternative to FB, but i have been using the new product lately and altho it could stand some usability work it’s not bad. the multi-sync function is a bit rough for me, but it does appear to be working.
all this aside, i think Facebook is a juggernaut that won’t be stopped… especially not for some rather dubious “open standard” issues being driven by an elite few rather than the unwashed masses. Kottke and others might as well be tilting at windmills — calling Facebook “closed” isn’t going to initiate change… rather, that comes from competition.
“open” is only as good as the underlying infrastructure, and right now i think Facebook has proven it’s got a pretty good foundation. remains to be seen if others like MySpace, LinkedIn, Plaxo, & Geni can become solid enough social infrastructure to support competitive ecosystems… but the is promise there.
ultimately, change happens when competition forces innovation. Microsoft & Windows didn’t become monopolies because they’re inherently evil… it’s because Apple (& others) were such crappy competitors in the early / late 90’s.
so will Plaxo cut the mustard as a true Facebook competitor? i doubt it… but i think Nick’s right there’s a lot of potential there. as with LinkedIn & Geni & Spock as well.
- dave mcclure
http://500hats.typepad.com/
ps – full disclosure: i’m a Facebook addict, a LinkedIn fan, and a Spock advisor. i use all three services pretty often. and if you’d like a Spock invite, drop me an email with your name + 3 tags that describe you, along with what you think is the best / worst feature in Facebook.
ps – Nick: you need to kick some hiney in the comments. tell ‘em who’s boss. (and i don’t mean mike
I signed up with Plaxo but gave up after a few minutes. The site was so slow that it was unusable.
I have added Plaxo to our MyOpenID site directory, OpenIDDirectory.com has a good list of OpenID enabled sites too.
I would also like to chime in on Nick’s behalf. I think he has the right idea, Plaxo’s adoption of OpenID is a big step toward opening up and transferring ownership of the user to the user. Which is in-line with the spirit of Open Source.
With OpenID you can create multiple personas per OpenID account. For example you can have one persona for your trusted sites including a field for friends emails or OpenID accounts, and one with only basic info (including perhaps a disposable email address) to use for new sites. All your information is stored on the OpenID server that you choose, and you pick what to share with which site and when. This makes it easy to ‘push and pull’ information relating to your identity between applications.
John: I don’t need a lesson in the difference between passport and oID. And I actually think that a universial online address book is a very much needed offering.
The point is that I don’t trust Plaxo with my personal contact info any more than I would trust Mike Vick to train my dog. But I am just one guy. It will be interesting to watch if this change helps out with active user growth.
None of this has anything to do with “open source” …which is why it’s not mentioned in the article—Ilya brought the subject up; and the answer to their original question is “it doesn’t”.
Ok, Mr. Gonzalez, one “unique” opinion about Plaxo doesn’t really represent a total loss of integrity.
Just don’t let it be the first step down that dark tunnel!!!!
I think Dave Whiner has provided some insight to the future (past?) with his recent blog comments about RSS aggregation.
I hear his comments when I read this article.
Personally, I have always felt the power of social networks was going to be the applications that use the data. I haven’t looked into the v3 Plaxo yet, but if I understand correctly – simply being a comprehensive social/contact directory is powerful. Allowing people to build social dashboards based on the information freely and disparately available through out our social networks.
Facebook partially addresses this within a walled garden – however as Dave Whiner points out – there is a much larger world out there than the applications available within FACEBOOK. What’s missing today is the maturity that people create, populate and manage the feeds that can be available in a world of different applications. And this is changing quickly.
People will have social dashboards to manage these feeds. Certainly – facebook is the leader, but there will be many different players.