Seems an open platform has served Plaxo well. Expect more of the same from good products and services that join Open Social.

Congrats to Plaxo!

Well the problem is that when everyone else joins OpenSocial they will see similar short term spikes and it will be hard to really put a value on such stats. Just because their gadget is being added doesn’t not translate into some real traffic. For example when owners of investment / financial sites post our Uber bookmarking icon (available at http://www.uberinvestor.com/faq-en.php#2 ) on their sites, it gives us hits since our image is being downloaded. But we cannot count that as real traffic. Same goes for these gadgets. I agree that these gadgets are a good way to market your site but again wouldn’t there be a gadget clutter?

looks like open social killed plaxo, currently the site says.

“There seems to be a problem. I’ll tell you what… let us fix it and this can be our little secret.”

They built a great product. They “deserve” the traffic increase.

I wonder if Linkedin has seen any increase in traffic? I have noticed that I have received a few more invites than normal over the pat few days.

A major concern for people is having to input info over and over again. OpenSocial will hopefully solve this issue and therefor people should be willing to submit more information as they know they can take it with them.

Plaxo is back to spamming, like in the Good Old Days… and don’t get me started on it’s not Plaxo, but the users. Plaxo Pulse invitations from strangers are nothing but spam.

What does this mean: from 200,000 to 1,000,000 connections? Like 100,000 people went from having two friends to ten friends?

Wow, lucky for Plaxo they joined OpenSocial

This is only natural and will be similar accross the entire OpenSocial graph. I have friends who are myspacers and facebookers. Some are LinkedIn, while others belong to other networks. I expect this will be parallel accross all the OpenSocial networks.
On the other hand, OpenSocial will also “open” the door for some rampant activity that is usually associated being “open.” I hope they all expect to beef up security or people will eventually “close” their profiles. This will prove to be an invasion on our privacy like never seen before.

Please qualify ‘connections since launch’

Have other companies who joined OpenSocial, had similar jumps in traffic?
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Not really sure what that graph translates to as far as users/signups/etc. are concerned;

I have received a zero percent increase in plaxo invites (I get one linked in invite every two weeks, and one from facebook monthly, and one “odd network” on a monthly basis as well).

Stilll, I have yet to see a business that was thrown from “stagnant” to “rocket” by virtue of leveraging the latest buzz worthy platform / technology / or feature

I like how the graph in this article links to an image of the same size, that is just as hard to read.

I am unsure if this is a good thing, probably most people here think that having people interconnecting is good, but I think there should be value for these connections.
Take a look at Myspace, connections there have no more credibility since people were mass adding people just to get more connections and then later start to spam them.

wait, what App’s are now available on Plaxo becuase of the OpenSocial partnership? Any?

I am skeptical of the spike….I am Analyst and know that anyone can take any data and make it look amazing.

“the number of connections on Plaxo has skyrocketed from about 200,000 to over a million.”

Reminds me of typical hype-speak to razzle and dazzle any potential investor.

Similarly to counting “hits” as a way of measuring how popular a website is (and comparing that to, say, unique visitors of other sites).

The plaxo blog was non-helpful in defining what that actually means.

But it sure does sound good.

Umm… What *exactly* does this spike have to do with OpenSocial? Are there even any OpenSocial apps on Plaxo?

Don’t get me wrong, I actually love Plaxo for its syncing ability (the Mac plugin is great) but I interested as to how OpenSocial is the reason for the rise. Is it perhaps more brand exposure related than any Opensocial implementation itself? I just cant see there being a rush into Plaxo as a result of opensocial widgets…but I can see their name getting exposure increasing signups.

Indeed it is neither the Google OpenSocial APIs nor the early OpenSocial apps that caused the inflection point. It was the enormous interest in the “open” story that sent a wave new (and old) users into the Plaxo Pulse offering. That kicked off a (sustained) wave of more rapid growth in new users and an accleration in the rate adding connections. Very cool to see how that rate did not drop back down after the initial PR wave. We’ll see where it all goes from here, but I stick by my claim that “open” is good for business. My full blogpost is here: http://blog.plaxo.com/archives.....e_res.html

Plaxo has done extremely well… their current server problems are a GOOD problem to have, not a bad one… shows they where unprepared for such a ramp-up… and to be honest, I doubt many could have predicted this as well.

Jon

John (#18) is correct…it has to do with the launch of Plaxo Pulse (check the date).

I am sure I am counted as a “new connection” even though I have never used Plaxo. I got an email from a friend that does use it saying he has added me to his Plaxo Pulse.

This is marketing B.S. and it is too bad because they seemed to have already been a good/well respected company.

I have noticed a LOT more emails from Plaxo recently… and to be honest, they’re getting incredibly annoying.

Connections != users.

I have never heard of plaxo until today. Myspace and YouTube are going to make plaxo popular.

OK, so I’ve read the original post, John M.’s reply and still don’t have the answer to this seemingly simple question - “What is a connection?” Please provide a simple answer in non-Plaxo terms. Anything else will sound like marketing/PR jibberish… Any wonder why there is sooo much skepticism here from the original post? Sorta like our ongoing “progress” in Iraq…

A “connection” on Pulse is similar to a “friend” on Facebook or a “Connection” on LinkedIn. It is bi-directional and volitional. What is different about a connection on Pulse, as compared with these other examples, is that all connections on Pulse get characterized (by the participants) as family, friend, business network, or some combination of those.

When you hear terms like “social graph,” it refers to all of the users and how they are connected. So, how many connections that exist (and the trend over time in the rate of connection) is one of several key measures of a social site.

In addition, a “connection” in Pulse, because it gets characterized by the two people connected, serves as the basis for a more granular control of sharing.

For example, in Pulse, I may choose to share my blog and Twitter feeds with my Business Network, my Last.fm and Yelp feeds with my Friends, and my Flickr feed with my Family.

As a result of this rich permission model, real conversations emerge within Pulse. (As opposed to the sophomoric comment streams that we somtimes see on public sites.)

but it hasn’t been good to me.

# of connections? seriously, what a horrible metric to use.

John McCrea , I would like you to come clean please. Tell us exactly what you changed about the way you send out invite emails to join pulse. I recieved a significant # of the last few weeks from EXISTING contacts I have on plaxo. Neither them nor I authorized these emails.

Kudo’s to John for coming to TechCrunch and talking with us.

Thanks, Jeff. Hey, Will, I certainly take issue with what you are saying, and would like the opportunity to set the record straight. If you believe you have received a connection request from someone who did not actually send it to you, please forward it to me. I’m john at plaxo dot com.

thank you John. I will follow up with you individually.

Thanks John for the personal reply. So just to make sure I understand, you guys announce OS with Google, you get some attention and some new users. Those new users have, let’s say, an average of 100 contacts identified as family, friends, or business associates. So then is it fair to say that all of this hullabaloo is all about (1M Connections divided by 100 Connections/New User) or ~10,000 new users? Doesn’t Facebook do that in an hour? What’s more interesting to me is the data prior to the OS announcement. If I extrapolate YOUR OWN chart backwards in time, it looks like you had little to no connections a year(?) ago. I know that’s not true. But it’s even fishier and taints the overall graphic. Sorry for the scrutiny, but I am very learned in lying with statistics, and am very skeptical (as are many others here) when a company releases a graphic that looks like the “Big Finish” slide from a VC pitch in 1998. I am even more surprised that Michael A. didn’t raise any of these issues and immediately went to the “attaboy.” I guess it’s still true that success kills objectivity, especially in the media. I’ll be looking for the “Fox News buys TechCrunch” announcement soon…

And has someone successfully installed and test an OpenSocial application in Plaxo ?
I still wait a validation for my application