As more and more people joined the conversation this summer about the opening of the social web, a very common question was, “Will the walled gardens really open up? Isn’t “open” bad for business?”
Well, today, Plaxo tackles that question by sharing some early results from Pulse, a “open social network” they beta launched in August. Looks like their timing was good:
Nice to finally see discussion of a social graph supported by data and visuals about the social graph (instead of other indirect measures)!
The Real McCrea 
Nice to see OpenSocial hype taking off.
According to Alexa, it appears the hype is cooling off already though.
Plaxo would do itself a big favor by creating a directory of supported OpenSocial applications. How can users know if there’s fire behind the OpenSocial smoke. With the help missing, potential Plaxo Pulse users are left in the void.
Do not get me wrong. I really like the OpenSocial APIs concept, and I hope it will make user data federation possible and open up the social graph by version 1.0.
I’d be careful to infer social graph trends by looking at Alexa, which at best is an imperfect measure of traffic — not a window in connections being made. That said, we enter a holiday week, so expect a bit of seasonal slowdown!
[…] Plaxo has skyrocketed from about 200,000 to over a million. Here is a graph from Plaxo marketing VP John McCrea (nice hockey stick, […]