It's hard to believe that it has only been a year that Pulse has been in existence. But as Pete's launch post attests, we rolled Pulse out to the world on August 5 of last year. Since then, it's been a mad dash of weekly releases to build out the feature set as rapidly as possible.

We've been really pleased with the great market reception for Pulse. Previously, we've talked about (first post and second post) how rapidly the "social graph" was getting wired together, aided by strong response to our Open initiatives and our innovative model of family/friend/business relationship categories. And that connecting up has actually accelerated in recent months, bringing total number of bi-directional connections to over 17 million!

Of course, that's not the most common metric for measuring success of a social network. More typically, one looks at the number of monthly unique visitors. Today, Compete just released the numbers for July, and while any traffic measurement system is imperfect (especially when a service offers client-based access options), this is a much followed source of traffic trends. They show a whopping 225% year-over-year growth in monthly unique visitors -- and 21% growth from June to July! Go, Pulse, go!

Of course, the specific numbers here are not really important; the trendline is what matters. Why? Well, Compete looks only at U.S. traffic, and Plaxo has a really large and growing international user base. In fact, we get almost half of our traffic from outside the U.S, so the Compete numbers certainly are undercounting our total.

But, hey, it's a birthday party. Let's not quibble. Pulse may only be twelve months old, but we're proud and excited to see how rapidly it's growing. (Check out how fast it's rising in rank.) Here's to accelerating growth in Pulse's second year!

John McCrea
VP of Marketing

“Going Dutch” usually means splitting the restaurant bill to share the cost, rather than having one person pick up the whole tab. You can think of it as a participatory experience, where everyone contributes to and shares equally in the fun.

In my mind that's also how Plaxo users in the Netherlands relate to our service. They participate. And participate. And participate.
The Netherlands – representing our third largest user base (after the U.S. and the U.K.) – ranks second in pageviews and first in the world in number of Pulse connections per user. That’s what I call participating and sharing!

We at Plaxo felt we had to do our part in the sharing too. Last week we released a Dutch version of the Plaxo service, including our networked address book, online calendar, and next-generation social network, Pulse. Users can also download our connector for data sync with Microsoft Outlook. The connector for the Mac Address Book will be available soon. You can take a peek at Dutch Pulse and Address Book screens here.

By “Going Dutch”, we want to express how delighted we are with the way Pulse took off in the Netherlands – and, perhaps, accelerate our already high growth rate there.

Regina Bustamante
Director, Globalization

It’s official! Plaxo and Comcast have received all necessary approvals and have exchanged all necessary paperwork. As of today, Plaxo is officially part of Comcast Interactive Media. We outlined most of the rationale for joining forces in the blog post we wrote at the time we signed the definitive agreement. In the intervening month and a half, we’ve been working closely with Comcast on more detailed plans to make the social media vision a reality.

Suffice it to say, we are more excited than ever about what this transition will mean for employees, partners, and…most importantly…Plaxo’s customers around the world. Once again, our heartfelt thanks to everyone who supported Plaxo in reaching this stage. The best is yet to come.

Ben Golub
CEO, Plaxo

A new service called Gnip just launched that supplies a sorely needed piece of backend infrastructure for the burgeoning Social Web--making it quick and efficient for user-generated content created on a rapidly growing list of social sites (e.g. Digg or Flickr) to show up in tools like Plaxo Pulse that "aggregate" this data from across the web on behalf of users. Those familiar with Plaxo's eagerness to lead by example by integrating new technologies that help open up the Social Web ecosystem should not be surprised to learn that we’re a launch partner for Gnip, and have already integrated their infrastructure into Pulse.

Here's a bit of info on how Gnip works, why it's good for Plaxo users, and why it's good for the Social Web:

In a nutshell, Gnip acts as a middleman that notifies aggregators of social media, like Plaxo, when user-generated content sites, like Digg or Flickr, have new content they need to distribute. So, rather than us having to repeatedly ask our content site partners, "got anything new for any of our users? how about now? now?", Gnip notifies us when there’s new stuff from any of our members, so we can immediately pick up that content and show it to the people who are supposed to see it in Pulse.

For Plaxo users, the benefit is simple: when you digg a story or bookmark a link with del.icio.us, etc. you should see that activity show up in Pulse a lot quicker--often within 60 seconds, whereas before integrating with Gnip, it might have taken an hour or more. Starting today, Digg and del.icio.us should be very quick to update, with Flickr and Twitter hopefully following shortly. And any publisher can easily send data thru Gnip using their API, so if Pulse pulls feeds from your site and you'd like that content to show up faster, we’ll then make it happen!

For the technically inclined, here's what's happening behind the scenes:

Most of the content in Pulse comes from public RSS feeds for each user who's hooked up one more sites into their Pulse stream. We have background jobs that periodically poll each feed for each user for each service, and whenever we see anything new, we update that user's Pulse stream accordingly. Since we don't know in advance which users have new content at any given time, we have to keep polling each site for each user over and over again. If we want content to show up in Pulse more quickly, we have to poll the sites more frequently, and of course in any given minute, the vast majority of users haven't shared anything new right then, so the process is rather inefficient.

While providing individual RSS feeds for user activity on web 2.0 sites is nothing new, when we launched Pulse about a year ago, we were the first site to consume and aggregate these feeds en masse. Since we have such a large user base, and since polling is rather inefficient--particularly if you want to notice any updates quickly--Plaxo puts a rather large load on these sites, and in several cases even the larger sites have had to tell us to slow down so they can keep up with the demand. Since then, several new aggregator services have followed, including FriendFeed, SocialThing, and others, and as they gain popularity, they're further increasing the load on publisher sites.

Clearly this model will not continue to scale, and since the amount of social content being produced and consumed is rising every day, a better architecture is needed; one that efficiently routes updates from user generated content sites to social media aggregators, rather than the other way around. There are various technical ways to accomplish this today--posting updates directly to the aggregators, federated messaging protocols like xmpp (aka jabber), real-time public update streams, etc.--but few are widely deployed or easy to work with, which is why polling is still the dominant model used. Until now.

Gnip is stepping in to catalyze the shift from polling to pushing notifications by doing the hard work of consuming all the existing notification systems out there today (and polling itself, as needed) and pushing out the relevant updates to consumers like Plaxo and others. Pulse tells Gnip which users we want updates for (e.g. which Digg users have shared their public feed of dugg stories in Pulse), and whenever any of those users digg a new story, Gnip proactively notifies Plaxo, telling us which users have new activity, all within 60 seconds! Using Gnip, Plaxo no longer has to poll with high frequency to get quick updates--in fact, not only can we poll less frequently (which helps relieve the load on both Plaxo and the publishers we're currently hammering), but we get updates much faster than we could before. It's a classic example of a win-win created by reducing inefficiency in the system overall.

A quick note about standards: in the fully realized social web, there should be no need for single points of full centralization, either for Identity Providers, Social Graph Providers, or Content Aggregators. In each case, open standards will allow a decentralized and competitive "service layer" to emerge. For identity, OpenID is such a standard, and its adoption is continuing to spread rapidly. For "who you know" data, OAuth provides a standard way to securely share private data between trusted services, and efforts are underway to also standardize APIs for making address book and social graph data portable. As mentioned above, in the case of sharing and aggregating social web activity data, things are a bit more nascent. Standards like xmpp may someday gain wider adoption, but until then an opportunity exists to help realize that vision sooner.

Just as companies like Clickpass have stepped in to make OpenID more user-friendly and widespread, so too is Gnip stepping in to make scalable content sharing a reality sooner rather than later. In both cases, Plaxo is supporting these efforts because they provide useful value today, and they demonstrate the potential that truly opening up the social web provides, which we believe will bring about the future we all want even more rapidly. Today marks yet another acceleration of that progress, and we all know it won't be the last one!

--Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect

Plaxo is now fully integrated with FriendConnect--Google's widget-based tool for socially enabling any web site. This means on any site running FriendConnect, you can now securely connect your Plaxo account, see which of your contacts are also on that site, and invite any of your contacts to join that site. And, perhaps coolest of all, you can choose to have any activities you share on that site flow back into Pulse, so your Plaxo connections can keep in touch with you across the web and discover new sites you've found.

This is a truly useful and exciting integration--it's the closest we've come yet to a seamless social web ecosystem, in which users can take their identity and relationships with them across the web, find the people they know at a new site, and share activity back with their existing contacts, creating a virtuous cycle of more social discovery and sharing. This is how the social web should work--rather than having to start from scratch every time you try a new social site (which is still the norm for most sites today), each new experience you have should enrich the others.

This only works when services give their users control over their data and provide them with secure access using open standards. And that's exactly what Plaxo is doing with FriendConnect. When you connect your Plaxo account, we're using OAuth so you don't have to give out your Plaxo password, and you can always choose to revoke access later. And when you share activity from FriendConnect back into Pulse, we're using the OpenSocial 0.8 RESTful Activites API. The only custom integration right now is with our address book API, and we're already working with the community to develop an open standard for that piece of the puzzle too. We firmly believe that acting as an Identity Provider, Social Graph Provider, and Content Aggregator--that is, letting our users take their data and relationships with them across the web and share data back from anywhere--is good for users, good for Plaxo, and good for the Web. And we're just getting started--stay tuned for additional enhancements, including more fine-grained control over which of your family, friends, and business network you want to connect with on other sites, and who you want to see your shared activity from FriendConnect sites!

Here are some screen shots of Plaxo's integration with Google FriendConnect--or you can experience it for yourself on any FriendConnect-powered site.

This morning, Yahoo! announced the public availability of its Address Book API, and we’re excited to announce that Plaxo is among the first sites with a live implementation. This new API has made it possible for us to re-launch a very popular feature – automated bi-directional address book sync between Yahoo! and Plaxo! (Wow! That’s a lot of exclamation points.)

This is another great move from Yahoo!, who has been showing real leadership in the area of data portability and opening up the Social Web. It follows on the heels of Yahoo! becoming an OpenID provider. (We were glad to be a launch partner for that, too.)

The next phase of the Web will be enabled by empowering users with control over their data, and the ability to let them use within the tools, services, and devices they choose. The Yahoo! Address Book API is a great step in that direction, giving users access to their address book data – and without having to give up their username and password to a third-party site. (And we're particularly excited to see Yahoo's continued commitment to supporting open standards; sounds like OAuth support is on the way!)

If you’re a Plaxo user and want to set up (or re-activate) sync with Yahoo!, here’s a post with the instructions.

Joseph Smarr
Chief Platform Architect

I'm happy to inform you that Yahoo sync is back, thanks to a new API just announced by Yahoo! It is now once again possible for you to turn on address book sync between Yahoo and Plaxo. To activate Yahoo address book sync go to:

http://www.plaxo.com/po3/?module=dashboard&operation=addSync&cid=Yahoo

And if you had this feature turned on at some time in the past, you can now re-activate that sync point. Just follow this simple process:

Step 1: Login into Plaxo and bring up your address book.

Step 2: Click on your Yahoo endpoint to initiate the re-authentication process.

A window will pop up where you can sign in to Yahoo, accept their terms of service, and authorize Plaxo to access your address book.

Step 3: Once the re-authentication process is completed, then you can trigger synchronization to Yahoo. Click on “Manage” to bring up the options lightbox.

Step 4: Inside the light box, click “Sync Now”.

If you have hundreds of contacts being synced from Plaxo to Yahoo, be aware that is can take up to twenty four hours before seeing your contacts appear in Yahoo for the first-time sync.

For everyone who has been eagerly awaiting for the return of this feature, thanks so much for your patience. I think you'll be pleased with the result, as the new Yahoo Address Book API will make sync a much more robust offering.

And of course, we're still not done. We're working harder than ever on new features to bring your address book to life.

--Mark Hashimoto, Server Engineer (and honorary technical yahoo by now!)

Last month we added one of the key features that had been missing from our spin on social networking, the ability to search for people. We want to make Pulse a comfortable and enjoyable experience for mainstream users around the world. So, out of respect for user privacy, we decided to make the directory 100% opt in. The only profiles in our directory are from members who explicitly opted to be included in the directory.

Now that over a million of our members have opted-in, we’re now ready to open the doors on the directory. It’s available at www.plaxo.com/directory. Over time, the directory will keep getting better, as more of our 20 million (and rapidly growing) member base opts-in. We're initially launching in English, with more languages to come.

As the directory will be indexed by Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines, we chose to make your default public profile page fairly minimal. You can customize your public profile page to show any and all (or none) of your Plaxo profile. For example, you can choose whether to show your educational history, your professional history, or your interests. You can also create an easy-to-remember URL that you can print on your business card, like hongkwon.myplaxo.com (it's printed on mine). To get started, go to your public profile settings page.

Of course, if you change your mind and decide not to be listed, opting out is as simple as going to your settings and turning off People Search.

Hong Kwon
Product Manager

With the recent announcement that Plaxo has signed an agreement to be acquired by Comcast, I've been receiving a few emails from members asking, “What will happen to my data?” So I thought I’d address that with a quick blogpost.

The short answer is that the same privacy protections that you have now will remain in place after the acquisition closes. Plaxo will remain as an independent subsidiary of Comcast, with all of the current management team (I will continue to serve as Plaxo’s Chief Privacy Officer). The Plaxo privacy policy is a legally-binding document which limits how your data may be used; it is also legally binding upon anyone who acquires Plaxo. This policy will remain in force following the acquisition and any data you have provided Plaxo will continue to be covered.

The privacy policy explicitly states that following a business transition (e.g. an acquisition) your information will continue to only be used in the manner specified by the privacy policy in effect at the time when that data was collected. If Plaxo wants to use your data in a different manner we are required to notify you as to the change; you will have a choice as to whether your data may be used in this manner. You will continue to have the ability to control your communications preferences (i.e. you can opt-out of receiving any promotional offers) and you will retain the ownership of your data, as well as the ability to delete your data at any time.

Many of us take for granted the words written in the privacy policies of the websites we visit. But I do encourage you to read ours here so that you can see the choices and empowerment we provide our users. You can also read more about what this acquisition means to you, as written by an independent watchdog group, TRUSTe. For the past several years, both Plaxo and Comcast have voluntarily agreed to have TrustE review their privacy practices for compliance. TRUSTe also provides a free service to our users to mediate any disputes involving their privacy rights and data.

Although Plaxo will be a Comcast subsidiary, we will remain independent - having our own privacy policy, keeping the same management and employees, and continuing the evolution of the address book. The acquisition does not change the Plaxo you already know, except that we look forward to providing more services and features for our users. By becoming a part of Comcast, we believe that we can make our services significantly better for all of our users.

We hope that you will continue to enjoy the services you’re getting from Plaxo, and we intend to keep making them better. But if at any time you no longer wish to be a member of the Plaxo network, you can delete your account at any time – and delete the personal data you have entrusted to us.

If you have any questions, concerns or feedbacks, please feel free to contact me at redgee @t plaxo.com or visit the Privacy and Security section in our community forums and join a public discussion – I’ll see you there.

Redgee Capili
Sr. Director Client Services &
Chief Privacy Officer

Big doings at Plaxo today! We are really excited to announce some of the biggest news in the history of Plaxo: We have just signed an agreement** to be acquired by Comcast, the nation's leading provider of entertainment, information and communications products and services (and our largest customer and partner).

Joining forces with Comcast is a real win for our customers, our investors, and our employees. Comcast has an exciting vision to bring the social media experience to mainstream consumers. Together, we will be able to help users connect with all the people they care about, across all of the devices they use, with all the media they love to consume, create, and share. This is also great news for the Internet industry at large, where Plaxo has been – and will continue to be – a strong advocate for opening up the Social Web.

Plaxo will remain an independent operation in Silicon Valley, reporting into Comcast Interactive Media, which is a division of Comcast that develops and operates Internet businesses focused on entertainment, information and communication. All of our 50 employees will continue to innovate on and grow both our networked address book service and our next-generation social network, Pulse. And through additional integration projects with Comcast, we’ll be able to take these services to a lot more users and places than we could on our own. We are developing an exciting roadmap with Comcast that includes socially enabling the media experience in places such as Comcast’s high traffic portal (Comcast.net),CIM’s popular interactive entertainment properties (such as Fancast and Fandango), and the television

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.

Continued Protection of Your Privacy and Support for Interoperability
Plaxo has always been a strong advocate of giving users ownership and control of their data. We protect our users’ data with one of the strongest privacy policies, which will continue. We will continue to work toward greater interoperability and data portability, with the user at the center and in control. Comcast has a similarly strong privacy policy, and we are both committed to ensuring that the protections users have come to expect will continue.

In Conclusion
Finally, we’d like to extend an enormous thanks to the people who have helped Plaxo reach this point—our millions of loyal customers, our patient investors and advisors, and the extraordinarily talented group of employees who have worked so hard to bring us to this point.

So, whether you’ve been a part of the Plaxo network for a long time, joined recently for Pulse, or have just followed us from the sidelines, we appreciate your interest in the Plaxo story. We are excited to open a new chapter today.

Ben Golub, CEO
Cameron Ring, Founder and Chief Architect
Todd Masonis, Founder and Vice President of Products

** We are not releasing financial details of the transaction. The acquisition is subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals, and is expected to close in the near future.