Plaxo and the Universal News Feed

From a user experience perspective, the best thing about Facebook is the news feed.  The fresh content that is personalized just for me, keeps me coming back.  I like seeing what my friends are doing.

There are two problems with the Facebook news feed.  First, it’s restricted to Facebook activities.  For example, if a friend of mine on Webmasterworld writes a great post, I’m not going to know about it unless I go to Webmasterworld. 

The second problem is that you have to go to Facebook to read your news feed.  There’s no RSS feed available, and those that have tried to hack one together have met the wrath of FB's lawyers.

Now if you’re Facebook, here’s where you make the point that you don’t have to be left out in the cold.  If you have a social app, why not build a Facebook version so that your community’s stuff shows up in the news feed?

So, any site’s content can show up in the Facebook News feed, but first that site must build an app.  There’s an explicit, non-trivial action required, and the burden is entirely on the third party.  In other words, it’s a Facebook world, and you can participate if you want to, but you have to go to them.  And once your community’s activities are captured by the Facebook news feed, within the Facebook news feed they will stay – driving repeat traffic primarily to Facebook, and not your site.

There are at least two companies that are trying to take a more open approach to the news feed; Plaxo and FriendFeed.

FriendFeed has been getting a lot of buzz recently, so rather than restate the excellent work of others, I’ll point you over to TechCrunch for the breakdown.

Plaxo would seem to be much further along towards executing the vision of a universal news feed via their Plaxo Pulse project.  They have 18M profiles.  They have a real, subscription powered business model that is already throwing off cash.  And they have Joseph Smarr, who has been thinking harder and longer about the ramifications of a universal news feed than anybody else that I’ve come across.

Here’s how Plaxo Pulse works:

Profiles are built out from a starting point of your Plaxo hosted contact information.  Via your Plaxo Pulse profile, you can search for other Plaxo members that are in your address book, and specify what sort of relationship you have with them: Family, Friend, Business Network, etc.  If members of your address book are not already using Plaxo Pulse, you can invite them to join.

So far this is sounding like any of the other hundreds of social networks out there.  But it gets more interesting:

Plaxo Pulse members can then hook up the feeds that correspond with their online activity to their profiles, and indicate what type of connection (family, friends, business) that this activity may be shared with.

Here’s the big difference between Plaxo and Facebook.  While Facebook’s news feed is powered by activity that happens within Facebook, Plaxo’s news feed (they call it Pulse Stream) is powered by RSS feeds coming from around the Web – blog posts, Flickr photos, Yelp reviews, Digg articles, Twitter tweets, Upcoming events, YouTube videos that you upload, weekly top artists from Last.FM, etc., etc., etc.

 

And, Plaxo provides you a nice RSS feed for your Pulse Stream that you can consume wherever you want.

From a publisher perspective, getting included in the library of Plaxo Pulse feeds is a much easier proposition than building a Facebook app.  You basically just need to provide Plaxo with the structure of your service’s RSS feeds that can be tied back to each member.  Even if you don’t get in touch with Plaxo, members of your social web site’s service can still associate your service’s RSS feeds with their Plaxo account – it just won’t be branded with an icon, and will show up as a generic blog post in the Pulse Stream.

Plaxo would seem to be missing a couple of things to be a serious threat to Facebook.  First and foremost, they’re missing the social graph.  While they do have 18M profile data points in the form of Plaxo Member data, they don’t really know how these profiles map together.  Second, they would seem to be light on traffic, at least in Social Network terms.  Until they start driving traffic out to publishers, you probably won’t see publishers clamoring to get their feeds formatted properly for optimal exposure in Plaxo Pulse.

However.  If you combine Plaxo’s efforts with Google’s supposed efforts to free up a portable social graph, suddenly Plaxo Pulse gets even more interesting.  If Plaxo (or Plaxo members) can easily import their friend, family, and business connections, suddenly all of those stand alone Plaxo data points could be woven together, creating awesome, web wide, open distribution channels for web activity and content of all kinds.

I have a soft spot in my heart for pioneering “Web 1.0” companies that were able to weather the dot com crash and that are still making noise in 2007.  Plaxo falls squarely into this group, and I’m a big fan.

Comments

[John Stark]

Nice review. I love my plaxo for it syncs my life.
Thanks for taking the time to talk about this issue. I've interacted with this new feature in plaxo but didn't understand the full potential of the enhancements until reading this.