San Francisco Iminta launches into private beta on Tuesday. Like a number of other startups, you tell the service the various social networks where you have accounts (delicious, flickr, YouTube, Lastfm, etc.) and the service creates a master list of everything you are up to on those sites. Your friends can then subscribe to your master feed, and/or you to theirs. 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). → Read More
In the words of one Silicon Valley insider that I spoke with today, “Plaxo has been desperately, desperately, desperately trying to sell” for quite some time. Late last year they got serious and hired an investment bank, Revolution Partners, to help move things along. 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. CrunchBase Information Plaxo Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
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. → Read More
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. CrunchBase Information Plaxo Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
We know Plaxo is for sale, presumably looking for north of $100 million and telling people around Silicon Valley that they’ve had an offer for north of $200 million. Revolution Partners, an investment bank, has been pitching them to all the big potential buyers. 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. CrunchBase Information Facebook Plaxo Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Joining the cavalcade of companies jumping on the open data bandwagon, LinkedIn has now joined Facebook, Google, Plaxo (announcement here) in joining the DataPortability Work Group. 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. → Read More
After publishing an invitation to Facebook to join the DataPortability Working Group January 4, we never thought that Facebook would accept it. Today changes everything you’ve ever thought about social-networking data and lock-in before, because today Facebook, Google and Plaxo have joined the DataPortability Workgroup. 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. CrunchBase Information Facebook Plaxo Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
News leaked prematurely today about a new Plaxo Pulse feature that allows users to match Facebook contacts to Pulse contacts, and then import contact data about the matches into Pulse. 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 → Read More
Plaxo, the Sequoia-backed start that transformed itself from a hated spam monster into a mild mannered and interesting business social network, has started a sale process according to a source. They’ve hired an investment bank, Revolution Partners, who are spearheading the sale effort. 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). CrunchBase Information Plaxo Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Plaxo has announced a new plugin that brings Plaxo Pulse to Microsoft Outlook. 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. → Read More
Update (Nick): We contacted John about the traffic spike. Essentially he says that the OpenSocial announcement helped publicize Plaxo Pulse. He believes the platform was more mature this time around and convinced a lot more users to sign on and invite their friends who invited more friends, causing the hockey stick. 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): CrunchBase Information Plaxo John McCrea Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
It didn’t take long for someone to hack the first OpenSocial application. In fact, it took just 45 minutes. 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). → Read More
The Google OpenSocial site is now live (here). The video above comes from the Google OpenSocial Campfire held Thursday night and is featured on the front of the new page.The site includes the complete OpenSocial API Documentation, FAQ and Group area.Also now live is OpenSocial support for Google’s big in Brazil social networking site Orkut (here). According to Google, the OpenSocial implementation on Orkut has the following benefits: * Building both showcase and canvas views, with Apps having the ability to create multi-page experiences in the full page canvas view. * Foster communication among friends by allowing access a user’s profile information, friend list, and an update feed so that people can see what their friends are up to. * Learn once, write everywhere as apps written for Orkut under OpenSocial can be used to build social apps for other websites. The OpenSocial team also has a blog here. Orkut joins Plaxo, and possibly tonight Ning as being the first sites with OpenSocial support. → Read More
Plaxo has released support for Google’s OpenSocial initiative. The API’s are currently at 0.5 release so Plaxo warns that things are likely to change as OpenSocial moves forward, however in their words “we want to make sure that everyone who’s getting excited about it has a place they can channel their energy and get things running sooner.” Plaxo support for OpenSocial consists of * users can now add OpenSocial gadgets to their Pulse profiles * each gadget also has a full canvas page inside Pulse * Plaxo supports complete profile and contact info for the profile and friends-list APIs * support for storing gadget prefs via the people data APIs * gadgets can create activity streams and publish activity data, which will show up in the Plaxo Pulse stream with rich rendering support * each activity can be commented on like normal feed items in Plaxo Pulse Plaxo has also implemented OpenSocial gadget support into their new Dynamic Profiles feature, allowing users to show a separate profile (photo, bio, contact info, interests, etc.) to business contacts and personal friends. Ning To Go Live Friday Night We also have unconfirmed news that Ning will be rolling out OpenSocial as an option to its 115,000+ social networks on Friday evening. It will be in beta/sandbox format, and network owners will be made to understand that the API may change one or more times before it’s stable. (Update: Ning is now live with OpenSocial) CrunchBase Information Plaxo Ning Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Google may have just come out of nowhere and checkmated Facebook in the social networking power struggle. MySpace and Six Apart will announce that they are joining Google’s OpenSocial initiative. Silicon Alley Insider reported the MySpace rumor earlier today. We’ve confirmed that from an independent source, as well as the fact that Six Apart is joining. Per the update below, Google has also confirmed Bebo is joining. Google will be making an announcement today. MySpace and Six Apart join Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle as announced Google partners. No word on whether MySpace will continue with efforts to complete its own recently announced platform, but the answer is probably yes. They are likely to simply do both (Update: see below). Suddenly, within just the last couple of days, the entire social networking world has announced that they are ganging up to take on Facebook, and Google is their Quarterback in the big game. Update (12:30 PST): On a press call with Google now. This was embargoed for 5:30 pm PST but they’ve moved the time up to 12:30 PST (now). Press release will go out later this evening. My notes: On the call, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said “we’ve been working with MySpace for more than a year in secret on this” (likely corresponding to their advertising deal announced a year ago). MySpace says their new platform efforts will be entirely focused on OpenSocial. The press release names Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING as current OpenSocial partners. We’re seeing a Flixster application on MySpace now through the OpenSocial APIs. Flixster says it took them less than a day to create this. I’ll add screen shots below. Here’s the big question – Will Facebook now be forced to join OpenSocial? Google says they are talking to “everyone.” This is a major strategic decision for Facebook, and they may have little choice but to join this coalition. Bebo has also joined OpenSocial. Flixster/MySpace screen shots: CrunchBase Information MySpace Six Apart Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
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. → Read More
TechCrunch has been hard on unified address book provider Plaxo in the past, and probably with due cause, given their previous spam promoting ways, but I am now reevaluating that view based on Plaxo Sync. I wrote about Plaxo’s improved Sync features back in June; although it sounded good I didn’t really have cause to use it then. Confronted with a “how do I sync various platforms, including the iPhone” problem I hit Google looking for a solution, and I kept finding user recommendations for Plaxo. Plaxo’s Sync tools support a variety of platforms, including Outlook, Internet Explorer (for Yahoo Address Books) Mac OSX and Thunderbird. Unfortunately they can’t sync with Gmail yet, but they can download your contacts from Gmail, although it does sync with Google Calendar. Plaxo can also download LinkedIn contacts; LinkedIn does offer downloads/ plugins as well but nothing quite as comprehensive as Plaxo. We’ve looked recently at Facebook replacing LinkedIn as a business networking tool, however being able to access LinkedIn connections via Plaxo makes LinkedIn all that much more useful as it delivers access to LinkedIn contacts everywhere, including the iPhone (Plaxo imports into the Mac OSX address book, that can then be synced to an iPhone via iTunes). The other selling point of Plaxo is the universal contact nature of the product; the ability for people to update their contact details on Plaxo and push that information out to other people is a definite positive. The basic Plaxo service is free, including the sync functionality. The $49.95 upgrade adds Plaxo support (which if it works well you should never need to use) and duplication filtering. The duplicate filtering tool isn’t brilliant, it missed some duplicates on a test, but after running it a second time it found more; a handy feature but perhaps not worth the $49.95 annual fee. → Read More
The idea of taking an address book application and turning it into a social network isn’t new – Plaxo just did it two weeks ago. Now ZYB, a Danish startup, is using the mobile phone contact list as the center of the network, and the company doesn’t have the emotional baggage that still lingers with Plaxo and makes many users hesitant to trust them (I, for one, forgave them long ago). Zyb first launched in mid 2006 as a service to back up your mobile phone. Through a relatively painless process, users can auto-sync their contacts and calendar to ZYB’s servers. It’s useful in the event of a lost phone, but the web interface is actually much easier to use to enter new contact and calendar information, too. The service, which is free, has about 200,000 active users (mostly in Europe). ZYB, realizing that people add most or all of their close friends, co-workers and family as mobile phone contacts, has now built a social network to leverage those connections. You can add anyone on your contact list as a friend, which sends a request to them to add you as well. Users have standard profile pages to add photos, comments, etc. And they can also text/sms in status updates which appear on their profile, and friends can choose to subscribe to those status updates via text as well (very Twitter-like). ZYB is free to users, although the company says they will eventually add premium services like Outlook-sync for an additional fee. The basic ZYB service is difficult to use on U.S. mobile phones, although the setup takes only a minute on European phones. U.S. residents can still sign up and use the service, though (as I have done) and simply add contacts manually. The company is headquartered in Copenhagen, and has a development office with most of its 20 employees in Cambridge. They raised €3 million in funding from Nordic Venture Partners in late 2006. → Read More
So Plaxo’s new social network, called Pulse (we wrote about it last month), is still extremely buggy. Robert Scoble and Matt Marshall say it launches properly on Monday, so hopefully they’ll have the kinks worked out by then. For now, it’s live but doesn’t really work. Plaxo has effectively turned itself into a social network. In terms of users, the biggest overlap will be with the professional crowd – LinkedIn. But the new functionality and interface is all Facebook. In particular, users can add streams of data about themselves, such as blog posts, flickr photos and Amazon Wishlists. You can then see all your friends’ streams on the site. It is nearly identical to Facebook’s News Feed, which launched last year. Nick Gonzalez loves the fact that Pulse is an open platform and compared it favorably to Facebook. I don’t disagree with what he wrote. But I noted some fairly venomous comments to that post by readers who say they can never trust Plaxo after all of the spamming complaints in the company’s early years. Will users flock to Plaxo and use Pulse in the same way that they use Facebook today? I don’t think they will. Facebook invented the news feed for social networks. Playing catch up is always hard. And when you are still fighting reputational issues, it becomes harder still. Even so, I’ve created a new account at Plaxo after long ago abandoning the service. I like that the news feed is not limited to Plaxo applications, and I intend to give it a fair shot. Perhaps it will steal some of my attention away from Facebook. We’ll see. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
