A couple of weeks ago, I asked the last person using Plaxo to turn out the lights. I was far too hasty, it appears, to write the calendar and contact synching company off. Within a couple of days, Plaxo's nice PR people had called up, and this afternoon I listened to a presentation from vice president and co-founder Tod Masonis and marketing VP John McCrea. The bunch at Plaxo have been busy. Very busy.
I'll explain what all this is about in a minute, but first off, it's worth saying that quite a lot of what I'm going to talk about isn't going to happen until next week. I have no idea if it will work - the screenshots show it working, but I haven't actually had a chance to try any of this out. So take this as a pinch of salt, but have a try for yourself if you have a Plaxo account.
That said, I think Plaxo has had a great idea. One of the key features of a lot of the new social networking sites is open interfaces. Building on that, and on Plaxo 3.0, the slightly less spammy version of Plaxo, has resulted in something else entirely. Before we go further, it's worth reading Rob Scoble's take on Plaxo 3.0, which gives a good catch-up for those of you who, like me, forgot all about Plaxo.
The basic premise behind the new service launched next week - and Scoble touched on this - is that Plaxo wants to be a Switzerland. Pulse, which is what the new service is called is still a bit of Plaxo, but it's quite different to what went before, which was basically an address book that your contacts could edit, with all kinds of helpful-ish extras that got more helpful when you paid for the premium version.
Pulse is intended to act as a sort of abstraction layer for a bunch of services, including webmail and web calendaring, but also as many of the social networking bits and bobs as it can possibly get.
In plain English, that means that it aggregates all of your contacts' published information into one feed - a feed that looks very similar to Facebook's profile view.
Twitter, Facebook and more are in there. Basically, if your contacts (and it's now dividing between personal and business contacts at last) have accounts on sites that Pulse knows about - be it Flickr, Facebook or MySpace, it will find them, and pull as much information into your page as possible. This is partly thanks to the open APIs on a lot of the social networking sites, and partly due to the rather social nature of these services - I've mentioned before the surprise at finding a status report I'd published to Facebook appear in someone else's Twitter feed.
Perhaps more importantly for Pulse users, social networking sites are added automatically by Pulse; no need to wonder if you should be checking out (and repopulating your contacts) on Pownce; you can simply check up on them on Pulse, and join in the fun if something actually seems to be going on in that neck of the woods.
Another thing I like, as opposed to the pay up front model that Plaxo used last time; there'll be a different revenue model. Google Ads feature in Pulse, so there's no need at present to charge for the service.
If this works as advertised - and I really, really hope it does - Pulse will be a worthy contender. It could get rid of the problems that bog down many people - half their friends are on Facebook, half are on Myspace. It's similar to the old instant messaging wars - Trillian and Adium removed the need to convert your friends to MSN or AOL - you could just log in to one application that aggregated all your IM accounts.
There'll be a launch of sorts next week; I can't wait to see how the new toy handles.
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