October 22, 2007

Plaxo Launches Pulse Widget

Michael Arrington

15 comments »

Pulse, which launched earlier this summer, is Plaxo’s foray into social networking. After years of collecting users’ contact information and address book contacts, they took the next step and created a social network around all that data.

One of the big features they added was a place for users to add information about what they are up to on any of dozens of other social networks - sites like Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, YouTube, etc. You then see a news feed on your Pulse pages that includes information on what your friends are up to. It’s very much like the news feed on Facebook, except its based on third party data.

Tonight they’ve launched a way for users to take that personal social network data and include it on another website via a widget. Once you have a Pulse account and have entered in a few of your feeds, you can grab the widget here. A RSS feed for this information is also available.

30Boxes may have been the first startup to innovate in this space. FriendFeed, an unlaunched startup we covered earlier this month, is also doing something very similar, as will other startups.

I’ve embedded the Plaxo widget below.

Sphere It

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 9:21 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Prolegomena » Blog Archive » Wednesday 2.0

November 7th, 2007 at 4:03 am

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Dan Birdwhistell

October 22nd, 2007 at 10:03 pm

This is OT and definitely spam, but I just wanted to get this out there given how much talk there has been about Facebook’s walled garden.

Earlier tonight we launched a very simple app that allows users to do a massive data dump of content from their friends’ profiles. We’ve sifted through the ToS, Privacy Policy, and Developer Docs, but there’s nothing that would prevent us from doing this. Despite this, it still feels slightly “icky”. We built this app as a personal utility (it’s so much easier to work with these data in a spreadsheet), but also to kind of test the comfort levels re: sucking data out of Facebook.

Feel free to play around with it: http://www.facebook.com/apps/a.....6751187779
Dan Birdwhistell

October 22nd, 2007 at 10:21 pm

Grumph — nevermind re: the above —> looks like our server wigs out when someone with 1000+ friends tries to do a data dump. Mike feel free to delete all of these OT things. We’ll hack on it some more.
Steve

October 22nd, 2007 at 10:22 pm

Is this really needed though? At least for me, I think it would benefit me much to have to aggregation on top of aggregation…
Robert Sanzalone

October 22nd, 2007 at 11:23 pm

Dan, would LOVE your utility to work but yes, it died and I have about 500 contacts.

Still checking out this Plaxo widget. Deciding which way to go when lifestreaming… everything within Twitter or an external widget (like this Plaxo) to cover everything.
RYK

October 23rd, 2007 at 12:12 am

This is an off topic question.

What does Plaxo mean to you?

To me it used to mean business address book. I find it hard to use Plaxo as a social network.
John Ward

October 23rd, 2007 at 1:55 am

“What does Plaxo mean to you?”

RYK,

I have a couple of initial reactions. First, what does “Classmates” mean to you? They’ve had crossover success connecting military and previous working friends, despite having a name that boxes them into a corner.

Second, since Plaxo’s partnership with AOL, it has been sitting on the edge of social networking for a while. Pulse seems like a natural next step.

That said, I agree with your general sentiment.
Marc Nobel

October 23rd, 2007 at 2:02 am

So basically, It’s a lifestream widget… I guess people enjoy reinventing the wheel over and over again.
Judi Sohn

October 23rd, 2007 at 4:01 am

I canceled my Plaxo account a few days ago, after years as a Premium member.

It was great when the focus was keeping my contact lists in sync. The new Plaxo interface is dog slow and the new connectors have been very buggy. On top of that, all the innovation and attention has been in Pulse, which doesn’t offer me anything that I either want or need.

I had contacts in my Plaxo address book because I needed to, um I don’t know…contact them?!? I don’t need Plaxo turn my contacts into a social network. There are other sites that do a much better job of that. So Plaxo went from doing a few things really well to doing a whole bunch of things, none of which are well done. No thanks.
Steve Ballmer

October 23rd, 2007 at 6:21 am

The social stuff is a FAD!

http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Derek Anderson

October 23rd, 2007 at 7:45 am

I am glad to see a working widget in a TC post. Even if the service is new and buggy.
I have been putting live widgets in my posts for a year and I know how much resources they take on any site. But it is a great way to show off what a widget can do without needing to actually go and register and set up the whole thing.
kayvaan

October 23rd, 2007 at 2:53 pm

am i the only one that doesn’t see the referenced Plaxo widget anywhere on the post?
EH

October 23rd, 2007 at 3:23 pm

What’s the over/under on Plaxo using this to spam the universe?

“{friend} wants you to know you may already have won a Plaxo profile!”
TH

October 25th, 2007 at 3:05 pm

EH - and that’s just it, Plaxo is now branded as a “spammer” from all those “Jane Dunn has just updated her contact information click to see details” emails of a couple of years ago. Plaxo is a tough sell for me forever because of that perception they created as the spam engine a couple years back.
Former Plaxo user

November 1st, 2007 at 3:43 pm

it’s too bad that Plaxo didn’t learn the lesson from Facebook and give users the ability to turn this feature off if you want privacy. The way Pulse is configured, every one of your Plaxo contacts sees all your other activity. Nice! The party photos I uploaded for my friends also get sent to my co-workers and there is no way to prevent it.