Sean Parker

Yammer, which won the top prize at last year’s TechCrunch50, recently rolled out a bunch of updates to its web version, as well as its Adobe Air-based desktop client. We use the service on a daily basis for work, and those of us with iPhones are all eagerly awaiting the release of the new version of the iPhone app with Push Notifications.

As the core concepts behind Yammer are quickly becoming features that others in the enterprise space are realizing they will need to compete with, Parker’s guidance should help the company maintain an advantage, and push forward.

Parker is currently serving as the Chairman of Causes, one of the most popular social networking applications, and is a Managing Partner at the VC firm, Founder’s Fund. He is perhaps best known for serving as Facebook’s President during the time it was founded. That role is about to get the Hollywood treatment in David Fincher’s upcoming movie, The Social Network, based on Ben Mezrich’s book, The Accidental Billionaires, about the early days of Facebook.

Parker also served as an expert panelist at this year’s TechCrunch50 a few weeks ago.

Mr. Parker joins George Zachary, Keith Rabois, Adam Ross, Adam Pisoni, and David Sacks on Yammer’s board. The latter two serve as Yammer’s VP of Technology and CEO, respectively.

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Glynx, not to be confused with the recently released Ginx, is taking a peer-to-peer approach to identity management and in the process promises to help its users take back control of their online identities. After downloading the Glynx software to either a PC or a Mac, you have a Plaxo-like contact manager for online contacts, email addresses and phone numbers, except there is no central directory. Instead, Glynx has a directory it calls the “Blackpages” that exists spread out on user’s computers. You can look up specific IDs of people you know by entering their email addresses or mobile numbers, but you can’t do browse it indiscriminately (this feature is supposed to make it more difficult for spammers to exploit the directory).

Glynx allows you to import your contacts from Outlook, Skype, and Facebook. It also offers a rich presence management tool that tells you when your Glynx contacts are online and the best way to contact them at any given moment. Finally, your Glynx ID also serves as an OpenID, making it easier to maintain a single identity across the Web.

Here is how the company describes the main benefits of its software:

Without Glynx, the web sites and service providers pretty much control how your information is used. They are in a position to watch your relationships and monitor what information you are sharing, and with whom. Your e-mail and messaging is increasingly full of SPAM and attempts to defraud you or steal your online identity. And your mobile connectivity and productivity is at the mercy of your service provider

. . . With Glynx your information stays on your PC. Unless, of course, you wish to share it with someone else – in which case it gets sent directly from your PC to theirs. No middle-men. But even before you share information, Glynx lets you know who you are dealing with. And you can know what each of your contacts is up to as soon as they do.

Glynx encrypts all entries to its distributed directory, and claims that nobody controls the directory. Thus, nobody knows what is in it other than the entries they have put into it or discovered in a piecemeal fashion.

Is this what phishers and spammers have reduced us to—looking for ways to hide in our own private Internet?

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Today, Google and Plaxo released a hybrid protocol that combines OpenID, the open online identity standard, with OAuth, the secure data portability standard. Too often, when a Website wants to import your contacts from another Web service, it asks for your login and password credentials. OAuth gets around that by sending you back to the original site where you login and authorize the one-time transfer of data. It is much more secure. And now it works with OpenID.

So far, this is just a test between Plaxo and Google, where a Plaxo member can invite someone via Gmail. Plaxo marketing VP John McCrea argues that this approach is:

- better for the user by being more convenient and more secure;
- better for the identity provider by not asking the user for their password and then scraping their data; and
- better for the site by delivering a higher conversion rate on signup flows and getting more useful data from the user.

It, of course, competes with another approach that is out there: Facebook Connect. But, then, that only works with Facebook.

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You may not know it, but you probably have an OpenID. If you have a Yahoo account, you have an OpenID. If you have a Windows Live account, you will soon have an OpenID. And today, if you have a Google e-mail account, you can also start using your Gmail address as an OpenID.

By joining the OpenID movement, Google completes the trifecta and adds all of its Gmail users to the hundreds of millions of Yahoo and Windows Live accounts that can also be used as a single login for any Website that accepts OpenID. While Google is more than happy to become an issuer of OpenIDs, what is not so clear is whether it will accept other OpenIDs for people who want to sign up for Google services.

Google appears to be an OpenID “provider,” not a “relying party.” In other words, you cannot sign into Google with your Yahoo account. But this still helps the OpenID movement as a whole because it gives smaller sites more incentive to join as “relying parties.” Among the first sites to accept Gmail accounts for sign in are Zoho and Plaxo.

AOL and MySpace are expected to jump aboard as OpenID providers as well. The only big holdout appears to be Facebook, which has its own competing Facebook Connect program. But even Facebook might eventually join the OpenID fold. (Its partners seem slightly less than enthusiastic about deploying Facebook Connect).

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What does this mean for the average Twitter user? It means that more third party services will start to work better. Today, other than a handful of services like Summize (which was just acquired by Twitter) and Friendfeed, third party apps must talk to Twitter via their normal APIs. Those APIs require applications to send Twitter a request and then get a response. The two way communication creates a big load on Twitter in the aggregate.

With XMPP Twitter just sends out all of their data in a constant stream, whether you ask for it or not. The third party, in this case Gnip, takes the data and parses it for further use.

Gnip acts as an intermediary between applications that create social content and those that consume it. They take the Twitter feed, which is a list of usernames, Twitter status URLs and time stamps, and make it available to any third party that requests it. Both Plaxo and MyBlogLog are already using the new feed, and more partners will add it immediately. And every third party that takes data from Gnip doesn’t have to take it from Twitter, easing the overall load on Twitter’s servers.

For now Gnip is only sending updates for requested users, not the richer data that some applications like Twhirl need to build a Twitter-like desktop environment. Twitter may give Gnip permission to send additional data, like @replies and direct messages, over time (if that last sentence doesn’t mean anything to you, it means you aren’t a crazy-heavy Twitter user, just disregard it).

What this means is that Twitter is taking yet another step towards openness and leaning on outside parties to help them with scaling issues.

Battle Over: Twitter Open Up To Gnip. Read more at TechcrunchIT >>

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A subset of the Gillmor Gang met via telephone this afternoon to debate the $150 – $170 million Comcast acquisition of Plaxo. Listen to Steve Gillmor, Dan Farber, Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis and me talk about whether this was a smart move for Comcast, or a sucker’s purchase of a company no one in Silicon Valley would touch.

Listen here.

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Plaxo has been the subject of considerable acquisition rumors lately, with both Google and Facebook named as potential suitors.

Plaxo says they will remain an independent organization in Silicon Valley. It will report into Comcast Interactive Media, which is a division of Comcast that develops and operates Internet businesses focused on entertainment, information and communication.

More from Plaxo’s CEO Ben Golub:

Plaxo and Comcast have been working together for the past year on a number of initiatives. Plaxo is providing the universal address book for Comcast’s SmartZone communications center (slated to launch later this year), and we are also now hosting all of the address book accounts for Comcast webmail users. Our partnership has already more than doubled the reach of the Plaxo network, bringing the total number of accounts to nearly 50 million.

Together, we intend to deliver on a vision of making “social media” a natural part of the lives of regular people, not just early-adopters. For example, you should be able to securely post family photos online in Pulse, and have them viewable by any of your family members, whether they are online, at work, on their mobile device, or in their living room watching TV. And you should be able to discover new shows to watch, based on what your friends and coworkers have recommended.

So, what about current Plaxo members? The services you know and enjoy from Plaxo will not only continue, but will continue to evolve and improve. In addition, both of our services benefit from “network effect,” which is to say that the more people who use them, the more useful they become.

On Monday I had an impromptu interview with Plaxo VP Marketing John McCrea and Chief Architect Joseph Smarr. They still had their poker faces on with regard to the acquisition:

This ends a long and sometimes troubled history for Plaxo, which was founded by Sean Parker, Minh Nguyen and two Stanford engineering students, Todd Masonis and Cameron Ring, in 2002. In 2006 the company finally abandoned it’s hated “viral” feature that tricked users into spamming their entire address book with Plaxo invitations.

More recently, however, Plaxo has been playing nice with the Internet. Last year they launched a popular service called Pulse, which pulls activity streams from other services into users’ Plaxo profiles. They were launch partners with Google Open Social, and announced support for DataPortability early this year. Even so, they still had the occasional misstep.

Update: The Gillmor Gang digests the news. Listen to the podcast here.

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MySpace launched Data Availability on Thursday, a competing product. Yesterday, in a suspiciously timed pre-release announcement, we heard about Facebook Connect, another similar product (with a nearly identical name to Google’s Friend Connect).

Like Data Availability and Facebook Connect, Google’s Friend Connect will be a way to securely send personal profile data, including friend lists, presence/status information, etc., to third party applications, say our sources. The primary benefit of these services is to allow users to maintain a single friends list and to coordinate social activities across different sites that perform different services. See my post on the Centralized Me for more of my thoughts on this.

The reason these companies are rushing to get products out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to control user data over the long run. If users don’t have to put profile and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access that data. The desire to own user identities over the long run is also causing the big Internet companies, in my opinion, to rush to become OpenID issuers (but not relying parties).

If what we hear is correct, Google’s offering may not be as attractive as MySpace’s and Facebook’s. Google may be keeping a tighter reign on data, requiring third parties to show it directly from Google’s servers in an iframe. By contract, MySpace and Facebook are sending data via an API and trusting third parties not to abuse it (with strict terms of service in case they violate that trust). That flexibility also allows those third parties to do more with the data, including combining it with their own data before displaying it.

We’ll have to wait until Monday for the exact details, though. But what’s clear is that Google wants to get in between social networks and the web sites that want to access their data. By controlling the flow through Open Social and the new Friend Connect product, they can effectively become a huge social network without actually having a, well, social network (unless you count Orkut).

Google’s been scrambling for partners to announce on Monday as well. So far our understanding is they have their own Orkut and Plaxo. Compare that to MySpace (Yahoo, eBay and Twitter, plus their own PhotoBucket) and Facebook, which announced Digg as an early partner.

Another limiting factor with Google’s product is that, unlike Facebook and MySpace, they do not already control user profiles for tens of millions of active users. That means they’ll quickly need to get big partners on board as well. Will MySpace help them? They may – MySpace is already part of Open Social and said on Thursday that they will adopt Open Social initiatives in this space once they are defined. We’ll see.

More details as they come in.

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We cover some amazing startups here at TechCrunch, and for every service we cover there’s probably a dozen we miss as well, given the hyper-inflated nature of the second great web boom. You can appreciate a service without ever actually going on to use it, but the better ones can change the way you interact with the web or run your working day. I thought as this is my last major post here that I’d share some of the services that I actually use. I started using most of them based on posts at TechCrunch, so if you like these turned out to be my practical standouts in the sea of noise.

Evernote

Evernote has completely changed the way I deal with paper (yes, old fashioned paper). Its been described as everything from a scrap collection through to a bookmarking service, but at its core its a database service with industrial strength OCR capabilities. To use, you can clip data or a link, type a note, add a photo (with support for webcams) or scan info in. Everything added can be tagged and indexed, and is searchable via the text within each document, for example a wine label with no other information becomes searchable by every word on the label itself. I scan every paper bill or letter I receive, allowing me to shred/ dispose of them cutting down on the need to file things manually. More importantly it cuts out the need to have to go through my filing cabinet searching for the bill later. The service has a desktop client and web interface, so you have the security of knowing that your scanned documents always have a local copy, but if you’re at another computer or on the go, you can easily access the same data.

See Erick’s review here.

Things
This isn’t a web application yet, but hopefully one day it will follow Evernote’s lead and offer a web backup/ sync services as well. Things is a clean, simple Getting Things Done client for the Mac that’s helped me overcome my constant cases of email bankruptcy. It takes a little discipline (I process my email at once every morning and add everything requiring follow up to Things), but its been a godsend in terms of information management. Users can add links to emails, webpages, or simply make notes, and you can tag, categorize and set due dates on all entries. They’re currently testing iCal support, so I’m hoping that if this works well I’ll be able to sync the data, via iCal, across various computers.

Skitch
Michael put me on to Skitch initially and I’ve never looked back. Skitch is a Mac image editing tool that also links into web based image hosting. It’s not a Photoshop replacement, but it handles 95% of my own image editing needs. Simple, quick, brilliant.

See Michael’s review here

Plaxo

Plaxo is trying to be many things to many people, from activity streams through to social networking, but its core syncing product has unlocked my data across multiple computers and even my iPhone. Plaxo syncs data from your calendar, address book and elsewhere between computers. It can also pull data from LinkedIn and some Google services. This allows my laptop, desktop and iPhone to be always in sync, and in case of emergency I can get to my address book via the web as well.

TechCrunch coverage here

LinkedIn

I never really appreciated LinkedIn until Plaxo gave me access to the data elsewhere. LinkedIn remains the premium business social networking destination and I find myself regularly using details I’ve pulled from it. I use Facebook as well, but I find LinkedIn provides more value.

TechCrunch coverage here.

Twitter

Twitter is like being married, you love it dearly but some times you want to strangle it. Twitter has transformed my networking in the last 12 months. It served as a conduit to building new relationships in a way that Facebook, FriendFeed and others never will. I can walk into a tech meeting/ conference/ meetup anywhere in Australia now and although I may have never met anyone in the room in person, I’ll know at least one person (usually more) from Twitter; you cant buy that level of contact and its given me friendships and acquittances that could never have come around by any other means. Twitter still has problems ahead: like a complete lack of a business model, but expect Twitter to continue to grow, with somebody (maybe Yahoo, although Biz prefers a Google exit) acquiring the service before December.

TechCrunch coverage here.

Grooveshark

Until recently this would have been Seeqpod, but since reviewing the Grooveshark player I’ve found myself listening to music there regularly. MyPlayList is another service I’ve been using, although not as much. The bonus with Grooveshark is quality: as all songs are uploaded by users (legally) and the quality is usually first rate, where as Seeqpod can be hit and miss sometimes. I want to love Pandora, and I used it for years, but given it’s now georetarded I’m blocked out. Last.fm isn’t bad, but it’s not a team player in terms of the industry and it’s also owned by CBS; I’d rather support the little guy.

There’s probably others as well I’ve forgotten about. One last shout out to 37Signals: I’ve used their services in the past when running a startup and they’re great (I’m not using them today) but their management ethos is a breath of fresh air in a world where people who want balance should (apparently) be working at Starbucks. If I were local and looking for a job, I’d be begging for a look in.

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Okay, making Plaxo look lame isn’t that hard. But as Plaxo has been groping around the past year trying to turn itself into a social network to attract a buyer (cough, Comcast), a little startup in the Netherlands called Soocial has been building a kick-ass contact management service that syncs all of your contacts between your desktop, cell phone, and a growing list of Web services. This company won one of the vote-in demo spots at the Next Web conference in Amsterdam (CEO Stefan Fountain pictured above), and their video demo featuring David Hasselhoff (shown below) stole the show. TechCrunch has 300 invites to the beta that you can grab here.

Soocial is not yet everything it could be, but it has a lot of potential, and its approach to syncing contacts is the right one. Right now, it supports an impressive 400 phones, contacts in Gmail, 37Signals’ Highrise CRM app, and contacts in your Mac address book on your desktop. (You gotta love a startup whose beta software works only on a Mac.) Support for Outllook on Windows machines is coming soon, as is syncing with LinkedIn, and contacts in Windows Live and Yahoo.

With all of these services and devices, if you add a contact in one, it updates your contact list and details everywhere else. This two-way syncing is what is really impressive. It even works with the iPhone, although only by syncing through iTunes on the desktop. Soocial also has a lame Facebook app, because Facebook does not allow syncing of contacts yet.

As more services open up with data portability and open APIs, Soocial will add them as well. All Soocial wants to do is sync your contacts no matter where you keep them. It is not trying to be a social network, and it is not trying to grow by spamming its users friends. “Not everybody has friends, but everybody has contacts,” says Fountain.

The startup is based in Arnhem, the Netherlands, and has raised 300,000 Euros from angel investors. It was founded in November, 2006. The business model is unclear, but the founders hope to be able to charge subscriptions to power users. Enjoy the video:

Hassle Free from Soocial on Vimeo.

(Photo by Anne Helmond)

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San Diego based FanBox from mobile solutions company SMS.ac offers a variety of services. From its front page it offers a reasonable web desktop package, complete with wordprocessing, IM and online storage. A social networking service is included, and the holding company sms.ac offers premium SMS services.

It sounds like a run of the mill package, except that like Plaxo in the past, FanBox spams potential signups by accessing the address books of its registered users. At least that’s what others have said, however I don’t recognize any of the names in the spam I’m now regularly receiving from the service, so it may well just be broad scale spamming of anyone and everyone.

I couldn’t find a lot of history on the company (in particular who bankrolled it). According to Wikipedia, Sms.ac was founded in 2001 and has over 50 million registered users worldwide. As an SMS provider the company has been accused of spamming people in the past, and a search of our archives found mention of the company in the comment threads on the Plaxo spam posts.

FanBox has been spamming people from at least the middle of last year. A search for “FanBox spam” in Google gives 5710 hits.

The spam from FanBox comes in a number of forms:

Registration Spam

You receive an email informing you that you’ve signed up for Fanbox and to click on the link to retrieve your password

Fan spam
[name]@Fanbox wants to be your loyal fan

Hi [name from your email] I’d note in my case it’s always my gmail account name, which isn’t my actual name but my company name
Yvonna@ FanBox wants to be your loyal fan!

Automatically sign in to view Yvonna@ FanBox’s profile and/or photo, and accept or reject her fan request.

Question spam

Subject: Karen has asked you a question on FanBox

Karen asked you a question. View the question and answer it.

Following the link usually takes you to a really vague and random question, like “Would you tell a lie if you knew it would not hurt anyone?”

Others have recommended that you should not click on FanBox links and most definitely not give them log in details for your email service. It’s wise advice.

To be fair though they are not the only people spamming my inbox at the moment, I still haven’t got around to blocking emails from Facebook apps, but at least there you now have a reasonable path to block the emails. Instead of offering a simple unsubscribe method, clicking on unsubscribe from FanBox gives you a full page of options, and no easy path to unsubscribing. I’d be concerned that clicking on any link from FanBox may simply result in confirming your email address to them as well.

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Third parties can already integrate directly today via the Facebook API, Beacon and the Facebook Platform, but adoption from these companies, which are indirectly also competing with Facebook, has been slow. Now, users can add the content stream directly. Users simply tell Facebook what third party services they use the most, along with their credentials or public feed for the site. The content stream is then pulled into your Facebook News Feed.

What this means: in your friends news feed, you may start to see more content from Flickr, Twitter, Digg and other third party services. This competes directly with what a number of startups are doing – namely FriendFeed, Plaxo Pulse and the more recently launched Iminta.

This is certainly an opening up of Facebook. And given that so many tens of millions of users spend so much time on the site already, it could remove the wind from the FriendFeed/Plaxo sails.

But don’t expect to see a RSS feed or widgets showing what you or your friends are up to any time soon. The data feeds that Facebook opened up last year do not extend to the News Feed. And from what we hear, Facebook hasn’t made a decision to open it up yet. Until they do, there is still plenty of breathing room for competitors.

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To be fair, some of my disdain for Comcast exists solely because they supply my cable and Internet at home, and really really suck at it. I believe I’ve spoken to every customer service rep they employ.

Plaxo did around $5 million in 2006 revenue, doubling that to $10-$12 million in 2007. 2008 projections are $20-$25 million. The company has 1.8 million worldwide visitors per month (Comscore).

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There are other services that are very similar – FriendFeed (still in private beta) and Plaxo Pulse are the most well known, but others include Mugshot, Readr, 30boxes and Spokeo.

For the most part, Iminta has features that are similar to those services, particularly FriendFeed. There are some differences worth noting, however. Whereas FriendFeed has only a single setting to make your feed public or private, Iminta allows you to create groups of friends and determine which groups see what content. On the flip side, they allow people viewing your feed to strip out some of your feeds. So if you Twitter too much, for example, your friends can choose not to see that, but leave everything else. Iminta also allows you to filter data by type when you are viewing a number of friends, or all of your friends, at once.

It makes for a less simplified interface than FriendFeed, which has its pros and cons. But as you add a lot of friends, the ability to manage the data is, in my opinion, a good thing.

Another thing I like about Iminta, and the reason I’m writing about it, is that the company has been bootstrapped to date by founder Aaron Newton (an ex CNET product manager) – I always like the non-funded startups. Newton says he began working on the site a year ago just because he wanted the product for himself and his friends. He got more serious about it, and left his job at CNET, when he first heard about FriendFeed in October.

You can request an invitation on Iminta now, and Newton says they’ll bring in as many people as they can starting on Tuesday. Once you are in you can also invite your friends – we’ve added Iminta to InviteShare to help you get a quick invite (FriendFeed is here).

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The rumor mill really got going when Revolution Partners started making their calls and sending out the company’s financial information to potential buyers. A rumor about a Facebook acquisition turned out to be false. Now Wired is reporting that Google may be doing the deal, for $200 million. Writer Megan McCarthy says she’s 100% sure a deal has been done, and thinks Google is the most likely buyer.

Plaxo did around $5 million in 2006 revenue, doubling that to $10-$12 million in 2007. 2008 projections are $20-$25 million. The company has 1.8 million worldwide visitors per month (Comscore).

Did Google buy them? The two companies are certainly friendly. Plaxo has been a big supporter of Google Open Social from the start, and has consistently adopted new Google social products. And Google’s new Social Graph API gels nicely with what Plaxo has done with Pulse.

More as this develops, if it does.

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Tens of millions of people have been busy the last few years building Facebook’s most valuable asset – their social graph. As people add friends, and those people add friends, Facebook gets to understand exactly how its users know each other. And as we saw with their “social ads platform,” where users essentially (and sometimes unwittingly) pimp services to each other, it’s not hard to make a little money from data like this.

Google, as usual, is not far behind. But they are taking a much different and more open approach to the social graph. Today they are launching the Social Graph API, which will allow third parties to grab social graph data that is produced by every day activities across the web – linking.

Who you are (defined by Flickr, blogs, Twitter and other web services) and who you know, can be determined by data included with links, or in other data included on web pages but not shown in a browser. The two standards around this, XFN and FOAF, provide explicit and public data to Google (and anyone else that looks) on who you are and who you know.

Technically this is pretty simple stuff. Links may contain XFN tags to state a a relationship, such as “me” or “friend.” These are explicit, public statements of relationships and are built in to many web applications, or can simply be added by humans.

Google is taking the resulting data and making it available to third parties, who can build this into their applications (including their Google Open Social applications).

Third parties are already jumping on board. Plaxo is adding the data to their Pulse profile pages to show additional relationships among users.

Companies can use this data as they please. A simple example is to remind a user of their Google-determined friends, and ask them if they want to add them on the new application, too.

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At some point last year people started to realize that the email inbox was not only the “original” Internet social network, it’s also going to be the backbone of social networking going forward. You already have your friends (people in your address book), and the social graph is already filled (people you email, and who they email, etc.).

Yahoo is clearly focused on this, for example. And In December Plaxo bolted their social network, Pulse, onto Outlook. Now you could see what a friend was up to just before emailing them. Today they are rolling out the same functionality for the Mac Address Book.

Users must download a plugin that acts as a bridge between Mac’s sync services and your Plaxo account. This also sync’s your Mac address book with your Plaxo address book. In addition to basic contact data, Pulse will pull in recent friend actions on social networks (blogs, Digg, Twitter, delicious, Flickr, Yelp, etc.).

If you are a Pulse member, download the Mac client here.

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There are now more rumors about the acquisition; specifically that Facebook is the buyer. VentureBeat is saying they have a source confirming the deal is “100%” happening. Our sources (and common sense) say its very unlikely any offer has been made, let alone accepted, and that Facebook may be just one of many companies taking a look at Plaxo.

Let’s look at the numbers. Plaxo reportedly did around $5 million in 2006 revenue, doubling that to $10-$12 million in 2007. 2008 projections are $20-$25 million. The company has just 1.8 million worldwide visitors per month (Comscore), less than 2% of Facebook’s 100 million monthly visitors. At current growth rates Facebook is adding around 10 million unique visitors per month. Putting this deal into perspective: Facebook grows a Plaxo every six days or so. And Comscore says 25% of Plaxo visitors are already coming to Facebook anyway.

Plaxo’s users also visit the site infrequently compared to Facebook users. Facebook’s 100 million visitors generate 42 billion or so monthly page views. Plaxo sees just 11 million page views per month, a tiny fraction of that. As an aside, Facebook generates the equivalent of a month’s worth of Plaxo traffic every 10-15 minutes.

Why would Facebook part with the rumored $200 million for a service that is so relatively small?

Crazier deals have been done, but this one isn’t happening (yet). Plaxo is a valuable property. It has a large professional social network and a great new product in Pulse – the sort of anti-Facebook news feed in that it pulls stuff from a variety of social networks instead of just Facebook. But it’s value will be greatest to someone that doesn’t already have those assets. Facebook does.

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LinkedIn has worked hard to become open since announcing their own open platform in June 2007 in response to Facebook, then becoming an initial OpenSocial launch partner in October 2007.

I spoke to the DataPortability Work Group head Chris Saad prior to the announcement and he told me that he was happy to see another leading social networking site join the group. Since the big announcement Tuesday he’s had a number of other approaches from leading sites to join the group, companies he wouldn’t name to me who might join in the coming days. It was only January 6 when we wrote the words “ultimately supporting open access to data is a positive thing…as social networking further matures in 2008, open access is a cause that may well find favor.” Little did we know then that there would be an almighty rush of companies signing up to work for open standards and data portability with the next four days. As much as it pains me on some levels to say this, thanks Robert Scoble, your Gandhi-esque resistance was the tipping point.

Update: Web developers from Flickr, SixApart, and Twitter have also joined.

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Google and Plaxo joining are a positive, however given that both have previously joined together for platforms such as OpenSocial it’s not that significant, but Facebook is another matter. On January 4 Michael sort of defended Facebook’s stance against Plaxo pulling data from Facebook on the grounds that “Facebook also has a very good reason for protecting email addresses – user privacy.” Today, by joining the DataPortability Working Group Facebook is embracing open standards and open access, and that is a huge fundamental change from its previous stance on being locked in to closed standards.

I spoke with the head of the DataPortability Group Chris Saad prior to this post (Chris is also the CEO of Faraday Media.) After about 24 hours of correspondence, the following are to join the working group as official representatives of their respective companies: Joseph Smarr (Plaxo), Brad Fitzpatrick (Google) and Benjamin Ling (Facebook).

The DataPortability Workgroup is actively working to create the ‘DataPortability Reference Design’ to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability (and here’s the key area) to allow users to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems.

There has been no shortage of people who have knocked Facebook for their closed standards prior to today, perhaps many of whom had a legitimate point. Today Facebook has taken the first step towards open standards and data portability, and despite those previous gripes they should be congratulated for it.

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Plaxo has been testing the feature with a number of journalists and bloggers. It involves running a script against Facebook. You tell Plaxo your Facebook account credentials; Plaxo then goes in to Facebook, looks up every one of your friends, and pulls down their contact information.

Plaxo could have done most of the work via the Facebook API (and in fact we covered a startup called FriendCSV that does just that). But the Facebook API doesn’t allow exporting of a crucial piece of data, email addresses. In fact, emails are shown as images instead of text on Facebook so that scripts cannot easily download them.

So Plaxo avoided the API and went with screen scraping. They developed optical character recognition software to recognize email addresses and add them to the export.

Facebook doesn’t like this, of course. But it isn’t Plaxo that’s paying the price. It’s the journalists and bloggers who’ve been testing out the service. Robert Scoble was banned yesterday from Facebook for running the script. He received an email from Facebook that said “Our systems indicate that you’ve been highly active on Facebook lately and viewing pages at a quick enough rate that we suspect you may be running an automated script. This kind of Activity would be a violation of our Terms of Use and potentially of federal and state laws.”

Plaxo was certainly aware of the risk. In an email from the company asking me to try the service last week, they said “We don’t know whether Facebook will try to shut us down (despite their increasing verbal support for the concepts of open-ness), so we want to let a few key folks have access to the functionality before we make it available to everyone.”

Yeah, they guessed right. Plaxo started running automated scripts against Facebook without any warning or discussion with them beforehand, in violation of their terms of service and, I’ll add, common sense. Of course users were shut down. Facebook must regulate this kind of behavior, without it the service would crumble.

Beyond the automated script issue, Facebook also has a very good reason for protecting email addresses – user privacy. Robert Scoble may be perfectly fine with having my contact information be easily downloaded from Facebook, but I may not be. Ultimately it should be me that decides, not him. And if Plaxo wants to push the envelope on user privacy issues, again, perhaps they should at least have given Facebook a heads up. And be prepared to take the consequences themselves instead of passing them off to their users. Robert Scoble was Plaxo’s lab rat in this experiment. I’m glad I wasn’t one, too.

Update: Loren Feldman basically agrees with me.

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We do not know what price Plaxo is looking for. The company has raised $28.3 million to date over four rounds, including $9 million last February. The company had over 15 million users as of September 2006, and their recent integration into Google Open Social has led to a further growth spike.

There were rumors in mid 2007 that Plaxo was being acquired by European competitor Xing. Those rumors were either inaccurate or the deal was never completed.

I have an email in to Plaxo CEO Ben Golub for comment. If I were him, I wouldn’t respond.

Update: User data from John McCrea, VP Marketing at Plaxo:

For our networked address book service, we’re right around 20 million users, plus another 15 million address book accounts hosted through partnerships.

Increasingly, though, we are focused on Pulse as the key driver of active users (and pageviews), and although we are still in beta (and haven’t yet broadly promoted to the address book user base), we’re seeing good month-over-month growth in all the key indicators. With Pulse, we’re at 1 million unique monthly users, up from 250K at the beginning of November. In terms of page views and time spent on the
site, our per-visit numbers appear to be comparable to Facebook (based on data from Compete.com), even though our demographic is much more like LinkedIn’s (professional, 25-50 y/o).

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Plaxo is claiming the new service is “historic;” its an extremely long stretch but this isn’t to say that the functionality isn’t interesting. With the new Outlook plugin, users can now see recent activity on a person’s Pulse stream in the Plaxo “Click to Connect” box and in Outlook’s “Contacts Detail” view. Plaxo’s Pulse product provides a lifestreaming service, so this will bring in social activity of contacts such as on blogs, Digg, Twitter, del.icio.us, Flickr, Yelp, and other sites into Outlook. Plaxo’s sync functionality allows users to add and sync details with users as they add them in Outlook as well.

I’m not a Windows user so I didn’t have Outlook to test the service on, but I am a happy user of Plaxo’s Mac OS X sync tool. I’ve written previously that it’s a great service and if the Outlook plugin is as good as it sounds it’s likely to find a willing user base.

The new Plaxo for Outlook can be downloaded here.

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Ever since Plaxo joined Google’s OpenSocial platform a couple weeks ago, the number of connections on Plaxo has skyrocketed from about 200,000 to over a million. Here is a graph from Plaxo marketing VP John McCrea (nice hockey stick, John):

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A developer who goes by the alias “theharmonyguy” and describes himself as “just an amateur” claims to have compromised the RockYou OpenSocial application on Plaxo called emote (see the Plaxo blog for details on the application). Specifically, he claims to have added a number of emoticons to Plaxo VP Marketing John McCrea’s profile within 45 minutes of it launching.

In an email, McCrea said he added all of the emoticons himself and his account doesn’t appear to be hacked. But when I asked theharmonyguy to hack my Plaxo account he did, within minutes, adding four quick emoticon messages such as “michael arrington is getting my bling on” and “michael arrington is w00t” (see image to left, none of those were added by me). theharmoneyguy then added one more to McCrea’s account, which will be difficult for him to deny:

theharmonyguy also pointed out specific problems with RockYou’s code, including some fairly humorous comments:

Some interesting code in there. For one, the app still doesn’t seem to be live for most of us (John McCrea from Plaxo has used it somehow) – it currently loads a “Please wait” iframe that never changes. But check out these code comments:

// TODO: no error checking – we’re bold…
// TODO: figure out why this is necessary???

Also, the code constantly branches between Plaxo and “default,” which appears to be Orkut. In fact, there are some hardcoded names that I bet showed up in some OpenSocial screenshots somewhere:

if (getContainerType() == “orkut”)
{
friendIds[iNumFriends] = “11285577331363942034″;
friendNames[iNumFriends] = “Raymond Chan”;
iNumFriends = iNumFriends + 1;

friendIds[iNumFriends] = “15479081059638046412″;
friendNames[iNumFriends] = “Jia Shen”;
iNumFriends = iNumFriends + 1;
}

theharmonyguy says he’s successfully hacked Facebook applications too, including the Superpoke app, but that it is more difficult:

Facebook apps are not quite this easy. The main issue I’ve found with Facebook apps is being able to access people’s app-related history; for instance, until recently, I could access the SuperPoke action feed for any user. (I could also SuperPoke any user; not sure if they’ve fixed that one. Finally, I can access all the SuperPoke actions – they haven’t fixed that one, but it’s more just for fun.) There are other apps where, last I checked, that was still an issue ( e.g. viewing anyone’s Graffiti posts).

But the way Facebook setup their platform, it’s tons harder to actually imitate a user and change profile info like this. I’m sure this kind of issue could be easily solved by some verification code on RockYou’s part, but it’s not inherent in the platform – unlike Facebook. I could do a lot more like this on FB if Facebook hadn’t set things up the way they did.

Oh, Facebook apps can also be prone to injection – I can insert any FBML I want onto the canvas pages of one popular app. But once again, I can’t really do anything, because to interface with the app requires me to have code related to that app, which isn’t generally available. Not sure if Google’s iframe implementation will be the same way.

Of course, the ability to change emoticons isn’t a particularly malicious hack; but the ease in which this was done suggests that Google has some work to do in getting its new platform stable. If they don’t, more damaging stuff may be on the way.

Update: Joseph Smarr, Plaxo’s Chief Platform Architect, says he has taken the application down for now:

Hi, just caught this thread now. Michael-thanks for the info. It does look like something isn’t quite working right. While I suspect it’s benign, e.g. some of the rockyou code not distinguishing between the “owner” and the “viewer” of the gadget (this stuff is not always easy to keep straight), I want to err on the side of caution, so I’m going to de-white-list the gadget for now.

As is, we’re maintaining a strict white-list so we don’t have any random would-be hackers messing around, and the platform itself is still a work in progress. Hopefully the benefit of seeing some real working OpenSocial code in production is worth bearing with a few kinks that need to get ironed out.

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