Plaxo in the News

December 29, 2008

6 New Web Technologies of 2008 You Need to Use Now

Every year, we see scores of innovations trickle onto the web everything from new browser features to cool web apps to entire programming languages. Some of these concepts just make us smile, then we move on. Some completely blow our minds with their utility and ingenuity and become must-haves.

December 18, 2008

Cant We All Just Get Along?

MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Digg--people are tired of entering the same information over and over again, every time they join a new social-networking site. Earlier this year, many social-site operators announced efforts to solve the problem by creating tools that make users‘ information portable. But as these products have started to roll out in the past few weeks, trying to keep up with them all has saddled websites with extra engineering.

December 16, 2008

Ways Job Seekers Can Find Old Contacts

When Rick Featherstone, 49, was laid off from DHL in August after nearly five years with the company, he dived into his Rolodex to call old network of colleagues and business associates. He figured it would be easy to reconnect. But it turned out that many of his former coworkers had moved on and finding them was a challenge. Mr. Featherstone, who had worked at just three companies over the previous 22 years, quickly realized his contact list was sorely out of date.

November 7, 2008

OpenID Q&A: Plaxos Joseph Smarr and John McCrea

After some recent considerable advances in the realm of OpenID, Webmonkey had the chance to chat with two of OpenIDs greatest evangelists and early adopters, Joseph Smarr and John McCrea. Smarr and McCrea are responsible for being among the first to implement OpenID on their online address book site, Plaxo. Together, they try to explain the momentum behind OpenID and how it might lead to even bigger things for the future of the web.

October 29, 2008

The Paperless Office Really

Of all the promises of information technology, none has proved more elusive than the paperless office. Although electronic communication has replaced much of the paper in my life, a lot of the most important informationfinancial and legal documents, expense report receipts, business cardsstubbornly remains on paper.

October 28, 2008

Easing Back to Work After Youve Retired

With the recent financial turmoil, many retirees are looking to re-enter the work force to make up for steep losses in their investment portfolios. Keep in mind that if you‘re under full retirement age and collecting Social Security, $1 will be deducted for every $2 you earn above the annual limit, which is $13,560 for 2008 and $14,160 for 2009; the limit is higher the year you reach full retirement age. However, once you stop working, you will likely see an increase in benefits to make up for the deductions. If you‘re going to work after you‘ve reached full retirement age, you won‘t be subject to earnings limits. Consider these six tips before heading back to work after retirement:

October 23, 2008

Netflix API Gets Love from Plaxo

When Netflix released its API, I said the coolest thing was that it gave developers access to a database of movies and actors. It also uses OAuth to let third parties create applications that build off of a users account.

October 6, 2008

Fruits of the Comcast-Plaxo Marriage: Fan Pages

If it wasn‘t immediately obvious why Comcast forked over a reported $150 million for Plaxo, a social networking site, it may become clearer later this month, when Plaxo officially launches Fan Pages for FanCast, Comcast‘s online video site.

September 29, 2008

One Key Fits All

Regular Internet users know how difficult it can be to manage all of the different user names and passwords required by the many Web sites they frequently visit. Wouldn‘t it be better if there were a simple and secure way to log on to all Web content?

September 26, 2008

Job Hunting Is, and Isnt, What It Used to Be

When I think back to my job-hunting days, my methods seem as quaint as comparing a Victrola to an iPod. First, there was no Internet. I perused trade journals for job possibilities. I painstakingly typed my resume on a typewriter (electric) and had to retype and retype and retype when I made a mistake. I cut and pasted my newspaper clips, which I needed to send along with the resume, onto letter-size paper, which was like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle with a few pieces missing.

September 2, 2008

Finding a New Position as a Mature Job Hunter

Searching for a job when you‘re 50 or older requires a different approach than a typical search. You‘re likely to seek opportunities higher up on the corporate ladder and may face perceived age bias. To succeed, you need to plan ahead, asserts Lynne A. Sarikas, director of the M.B.A. career center at Northeastern University in Boston. Consider this advice to secure a new position:

July/August 2008

Who Owns Your Friends?

Technology blogger Robert Scoble wanted help moving contact information for his 5,000 Facebook friends into his Microsoft Outlook address book. He turned to Joseph Smarr, chief platform architect at Plaxo, a company in Mountain View, CA, that synchronizes contact information between Outlook, other desktop e-mail programs, and a number of Web services. Smarr gave Scoble a short program to test out, which automati cally paged through Scoble‘s Facebook connections and extracted the names, birthdays, and e-mail addresses of his friends.

May 14, 2008

Its Complaxtic: Comcast Buys Plaxo to Bolster Video Sharing

Plaxo is best known for its fancy address-book software that automatically updates everyone on your contact list whenever you make a change. So why is the cable giant Comcast buying the Silicon Valley start-up?

May 14, 2008

Comcast goes social with Plaxo acquisition

Comcast is adding a social dimension to its services through the acquisition of Plaxo, a deal the two companies announced Wednesday afternoon.

May 14, 2008

Comcast buys social network pioneer Plaxo

Comcast Corp (CMCSA.O) has agreed to acquire pioneering Web start-up Plaxo Inc, which was first to turn address books into social networks and laid the foundation for Friendster and Facebook.

May 13, 2008

Google to Connect Friends Across the Web

To socialize these days, hundreds of millions of people every month visit networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. But what if the Web itself operated as a social network?

May 13, 2008

Google joins effort to make more Web sites more sociable

The effort to make it easier for Web surfers to connect with their friends is attracting a crowd. Following similar moves by the two biggest online hangouts, Internet search leader Google Inc. is introducing tools that are supposed to make any Web site more sociable. The service, expected to be available on a limited basis Monday evening, provides a framework that will enable people to interact with their friends and use favorite applications they have accumulated on social networks like Facebook and Plaxo even when they aren‘t visiting those sites.

May 5, 2008

Identity Crisis

It‘s the existential question of the Internet age: Who am I on this website? The Internet has come to dominate the way people keep in touch and share information. It has also fractured digital life - turning people into a piecemeal collection of user names, passwords, and online personas. Now, a growing number of efforts aim to fix the problem of online identity, so that photos shared on one website, social networks created on another, or restaurant reviews written at another are no longer fragmented.

March 20, 2008

Podcast: A Conversation with Plaxos John McCrea

John McCrea, the Veep at Plaxo in charge of marketing stopped by to do a live interview yesterday. The occasion that brought him by Mashable Conversations was the announcement of the results of the concepts of open and DataPortability when applied to a social network. The graphs he supplied us with prior to the interview and announcement were simply amazing.

February 29, 2008

Q&A: Throwing sheep at Plaxo's Joseph Smarr

MIAMI--Joseph Smarr, chief systems architect at Plaxo, has become somewhat of an icon of social media's future. An ardent supporter of open standards, Smarr is arguably one of the biggest proponents of Google's OpenSocial who can't officially claim to be a Googler. So it's fitting that Smarr has played a prominent role at the Future of Web Apps conference; CNET News.com had a chance to catch up with him on Thursday and find out some more about what "open" really means and what's next at Plaxo.