In another sprint, Joseph Smarr and the team at Plaxo, working closely with their counterparts at Google, now have Plaxo/Friend Connect integration live. Joseph has a nice writeup on the Plaxo blog. [Reminder/disclaimer: I work at Plaxo.] [Screenshot below.]
As regular readers know, I am a strong proponent of letting users access their local piece of the social graph at services all over the web. Clearly, Plaxo sees a market opportunity to become a major “social graph provider,” and this integration with Google Friend Connect is a good sign of progress in that effort. It is especially cool to see the “virtuous cycle” features of the integration; feeds of content flow back into Pulse from the Friend Connect site, enabling social discovery. In many ways, this looks like the beginning of the “Social Web.”
I’m currentyl in Washington, D.C. for the Graphing Social Patterns East conference, and will be speaking on a panel this afternoon on the Privacy and Data Portability. Facebook’s Dave Morin will be on it, so today’s news on Google Friend Connect should make for some interesting discussion.
Reactions coming in now. Nice post by David Recordon.
The Real McCrea 
John, I’ve got some more plans for the Plaxo team to get engaged and on the leading edge. Drop me an e-mail at louisgray@mac.com and I’ll let you in.
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