Plaxo Helps Open Up the Social Graph

Develops Online Identity Consolidator and releases it as open source; Launches developer guide at opensocialgraph.plaxo.com

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — August 29, 2007

As part of its ongoing support for the open social web as an alternative to walled gardens, Plaxo today released to open source the code for an important new piece of software, an Online Identity Consolidator. The new software contributes to the community effort to create a public, user-controlled "social graph," by leveraging the linkages people are publicly-asserting between the various social web applications they use, such as blogs, social and business networks, and photo/video sharing sites. In addition to releasing the Consolidator code, the company added features based on the technology to its recently-launched next-generation social network, Pulse, and published a Consolidator implementation site for developers at http://opensocialgraph.plaxo.com.

"Plaxo is firmly committed to the proposition that users should have ownership, control, and portability of their identity and their personal info," stated Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo. "The Online Identity Consolidator represents a new weapon in the battle for the open social web."

A debate has been heating up within the Web 2.0 community over whether the future of the social web will be defined by openness, with users in control of their data, or by walled gardens, in which corporations assert ownership of their users’ personal information and relationships. The call for a user-controlled approach to consolidation of online identities gained momentum with the recent publication of a manifesto by Brad Fitzpatrick (in collaboration with David Recordon), entitled "Thoughts on the Social Graph," available at http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/, and from subsequent discussion at the BarCampBlock event, where Tantek Çelik and Joseph Smarr joined Brad and David in jointly hosting a session on "Opening the Social Graph."

Plaxo also used the "semantically-aware" Consolidator technology to add new features to Pulse, its recently-launched next-generation social network. The company is using the Online Identity Consolidator to make the process of adding feeds more convenient by auto-discovering a user’s multiple identities across various social web applications (if the user has publicly-asserted such linkages). In addition, Plaxo members can now enhance their public profile with aggregated online identity information via the XFN microformat annotation standard to ensure interoperability with other open social web tools.

Today’s announcement is part of a broader strategy in support of the open social web, and follows recent moves by Plaxo to implement and endorse important open standards, including: SyncML, iCal, OpenID, and microformats.

About Plaxo

Plaxo helps millions of people around the world stay better connected with the people they know and care about. Serving customers since 2002, Plaxo is a privately held company, funded by leading investment and technology firms — Sequoia Capital, Globespan Capital Partners, Harbinger Venture Management, DAG Ventures, and Cisco Systems — and by individual investors Ram Shriram and Tim Koogle. The company offers services directly to consumers and through a wide range of service provider partnerships. More information is available at www.plaxo.com.

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