Plaxo, the online address book, will try to recreate itself as an open social network called “Pulse” beginning Monday.
In retrospect, you should have seen this coming. Plaxo is primed for this.
The Mountain View, Calif. company tells us it has 15 million people with registered accounts (we’re not sure how many of those are active). Many of those users, in turn, have imported their contact information from other services, such as Hotmail, AIM and Gmail — giving Plaxo an even larger reach than its registered numbers.
It’s no wonder it now wants to move beyond being an empty shell of contact information.
With Pulse (screenshots at bottom), each Plaxo user will be able to view their existing contact lists organized according to business, friends, family and other categories. It also includes a view of a stream of RSS feeds people whose contact information you already have in Plaxo.
Pulse uses Plaxo’s existing method of sorting contacts into business, friends, family members and other categories. The company launched a calendar service in late June that we noted looked similar to the event management feature of Facebook.
Plaxo has taken another step in that direction — the running stream of RSS feeds imitates Facebook’s news feed.
While Facebook displays all internal information about friends’ activities within Facebook, Plaxo will display RSS feeds from a wide range of popular web sites, including Amazon, Flickr,YouTube, LiveJournal and many, many others.
However, the division of contacts by type is a feature many Facebook users have wished for as their social, work and family networks blur.
The service is straightforward, from what we can see in these screenshots, below.
Scoble talked to Plaxo about it last night: He and his commenters have a lot more to say.
4 Comments
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teddlesruss said:
Being a longtime Plaxo user, I checked their new Plaxo out as soon as the first betas were available. I like it but I think it has a way to go, after a few rounds of emails it was established that most of the “bugs” I found were just not complete yet. And as far as I know most of those features are still not completed, so that tends to make me leave my content on Facebook for the moment…
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Own Own Business Online said:
More info please…. Your topic about Plaxo launching Pulse, its own social network needs more comments. I\’d like to spend me Saturday nights reading about own own business online
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Former Plaxo user said:
it’s too bad that Plaxo didn’t learn the lesson from Facebook and give users the ability to turn this feature off if you want privacy. The way Pulse is configured, every one of your Plaxo contacts sees all your other activity. Nice! The party photos I uploaded for my friends also get sent to my co-workers and there is no way to prevent it.
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Mark said:
Well i just got it and it seems that Google’s socialstream is doing the same things. But it looks that plaxo has beat them to the chance. I not for sure but i think that this site is clean end everything but I’m not sure of all this stuff why can’t someone just make a site without all the b.s. sometimes. This social stream thing reminds me of trillian for aim,msn,yahoo.. some people will use it some people won’t.. nothing big and i don’t see it making the site more usable for people to go to.
19 Trackbacks
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