In general plaxo is trying to figure out how we can put control back in the hands of users... how can they use this data, adding friends to new sites etc, so that the data can follow them and just work.

One of those building blocks toward that vision is being able to tell website which services you use. There's nothing that binds together all those sites -- i don't care what site their on, I just want to know what they're up to.

There are already existing open standards XFN, it has the ability to 

What's required then is some tool to crawl that data and link it together.

You can choose which pages to make public.

There are a lot of new services ... we've seen a lot of excitement around the idea 

Plaxo intends to be an openid provider.

There is a real social graph in the world and then there is the digital equiv, what we see is that for a lot of people the main ways they're doing that are e-mail and address  books -- that's the primary source.

If social network is taken to mean -- a way of 

john "The line between social network and network address book is blurring."

One of the ways we differ a bit from BF is we see a dsitnct between data that public and data that's portable. You want to be able to compartmentalize -- share with some and not others -- and still maintain that portability.

Obviously a lot of people are interested in open vs walled garden -- but peole have the mistaken notion that by open we mean public which isn't true, when we say open users should have control owner ship and their data not necesssarly that it's all public.

being able to catagorize friendships is essential

it's going to be a first step to get these sites to dhare info at all, but eventually hopefully more fine-grained control

THe trend is very much toward open.

There's a scism just like there was in the early days of the web, but there's 

we don't conflate open with public.

The reason there's so much momentum behind open is because -- except for the entrenched folks at the top -- by making it easier to discover and use the sites everyone is going to use them more.

We never spammed anybody, it was always users sending info to members in their address books and it started with the best intentions -- we were one of the few people who let you give out info without joining -- but we under estimated how much old info people keep in their addressbook. There was always this tension between wanting to make it easy and just too much info. We tried to do everything we could to throttle it, but in January of last year we suspended all the e-mailing stuff and apologized. While there's a little bit of residue of that, but hopefully the 

If you go back to the beginnings of plaxo, plaxo is fundamentally about how do you stay in contact with your friends and loved ones and that's what social networking is really about so this is really a natural progression.

The core vision that led us to start plaxo was that theres this proliferation of technology, but the sheer number of tools and the fact that people are constantly changing tools makes it harder to stay in touch. And even in 2002 the proliferation of e-mail providers IM providers led to plaxo and today that problem is, if anything more overwhelming.

We've always been in an interesting central position the switzerland of social information.

Walled gardens create friction and ought not to stay in

There's so many 

steady drumbeat of releases and code -- openid provider friends list portability, and open up pulse some more. 

This is a very exciting time in the industry, accerla