Plaxo Launches Pulse Widget

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.