In a word, “Yes.” Our focus all along has been on people connected with the people they know and care about. Our networked address book provides the foundation, and syncing is a core part of that offering. Pulse brings that address book to life. In many ways, we’ve expanded the notion of sync: data sync is at the core, then there is “people sync” which is the network effect in which each member keeps their own contact info up-to-date, and more broadly, Pulse “syncs” content from 40 different services.

I think one of the difficulties that all the startups fail to realize, is that building clients for 5+ different platforms can be tough. Everyone says “we support 5 trillion phones”,(which really means “Nokia” phones and a few others, phones being the key word though) The smartphones are the real in-demand devices for anyone serious about syncing information, and the hardest to develop. All have their own platform, and quirks.

It usually seems to start with an announcement about how a ton of phones are supported (Nokias), and a “coming soon” for blackberry, palm, windows mobile, iphone, and maybe android. That coming soon never materializes, because developing clients for those platforms turns out to be a lot tougher than was originally assumed by the development team. (Keep in mind, Nokias and the like have a built in sync client, which is why everyone says they support them.)

I will speculate the conversation among the developers goes something like this (Warning: Geek talk ahead):

“There are open source sync clients for these platforms, let’s use those!” “yeah good idea, i know a little bit of Programming Language X, I should be able to modify it for our needs.”

Then leading to:

“Oh wait, this open source stuff isn’t actually at the level we need it to be. There is a lot still missing, and I don’t know a lot about Programming Language X, it will take me forever”

And finally:

“Ok well, we can work on other stuff until the open source guys fix it.”

It’s tough to find the skillsets required to hit all the major smartphone platforms on what are usually small startup teams.

Anyhow, it will be interesting to see if soocial falls into the same trap.

Lou

And yes we are working on Outlook, and doing our best to provide part of what we can in the Data portability puzzle.

A quick question – would you still view contact syncing still as the core business of Plaxo or has it become more aggregating social data by way of Plaxo Pulse?