Josh Bernoff wants us all to stop talking about "users", and instead refer to the people who use the products we all create in this industry as people, customers and friends. Amen. The other term which I have spent years trying to erase from my vocabulary is "consumers". The people who use our products aren't "consumers", they're customers… people… and friends.
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Last week I chatted with Plaxo architect Joseph Smarr about their new OpenID initiative. Basically, what they've done is implement support for the use of an OpenID as your Plaxo credentials rather than a Plaxo specific account. Future plans call for them to also become an issuer of OpenID credentials too. What they're trying to become is a profile provider for OpenID users.
In addition, they've done work to support micro-formats in Plaxo. Again, the idea is that you should be able to visit sites and scrape up details like business cards and calendar items into your calendar and into Plaxo. So, for example, you can now visit my Plaxo profile, for instance, and scrape up my contact information from there. Similarly, Plaxo subscribers can publish a public calendar in this way.
This is the transformation of Plaxo from an address-book synchronization tool into an open standards identity supplier for the web. It's also a tremendous illustration of how to build and monetize a platform business. Plaxo's evolutionary path looks like this:
Plaxo is small compared to some of the web behemoths out there, but they seem to be executing well. They have a great opportunity to become one of the most useful utilities on the programmable web.
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