Plaxo Introduces Lifestreaming Widget

October 24, 2007; 10:37 AM

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — October 23, 2007

Continuing the company’s efforts to give users more control and portability of their personal info, Plaxo today added a "lifestreaming widget" to its next-generation, open social network, Pulse. The widget gives users a new way to share the content that they are creating across the social web and aggregating with Pulse. The large and growing list of sites that Pulse aggregates feeds from currently includes Digg, del.icio.us, Facebook, Flickr, Jaiku, MySpace, Twitter, Yelp, YouTube, and more than 20 others.

"Pulse represents the next-generation of social networking, one that embraces openness and harnesses the explosive growth in the number of socially-enabled sites," said Todd Masonis, Co-Founder and VP of Products. "Now, with the lifestreaming widget, we take ‘open’ to the next level, making it really easy to take what you aggregate in Pulse and publish it externally as a feed to any web page."

The lifestreaming widget makes it really easy to bring together what you are doing on a variety of socially-enabled services and present it in a single, interactive window on your blog or any other web page that accepts javascript. With just a couple of clicks, any Pulse user can create their own widget, with a choice of including either all of the feeds they are aggregating via Pulse, or just the ones that they have specifically marked as "public." Publishing the widget is as simple as cutting-and-pasting a snippet of code into the HTML of the page they want to display it in. Pulse users can create their widget at http://pulse.plaxo.com/pulse/widget.

Today’s announcement is part of Plaxo’s broader strategy to support the open social web, and follows several related moves, including: implementing and endorsing important open standards, SyncML, iCal, OpenID, and microformats; open source releasing its Online Identity Consolidator code; and co-authoring and supporting the "Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web".

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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