Plaxo Video on Pulse – Their Lifestreaming Platform

Today I came across this video via Kevin Lim’s blog. It’s a bit old, (released on 9/28) and almost 30 minutes, but I found it to be very much worth watching. The video was created by A-List blogger Robert Scoble.

Scoble interviews both Joseph Smarr, Plaxo’s architect, and John McCrea, VP of marketing. They speak in depth on Plaxo’s plight to create an open platform to allow for simple standards based interaction among social networking services. There is quite a bit of interesting information that had me stick to watching all 30 minutes of the video. I have to say that I’m pretty impressed by the Plaxo folks. Here I thought they were just this supercharged address book over the years and now they’ve decided to take on the plight of Lifestreaming.

I had already actually been playing a little bit with Pulse but hadn’t discussed it here yet. I just wasn’t grabbed by any of the functionality yet. Pretty basic and standard stuff. And the fact that you can only seem to share your Lifestream with other users of the service (they claim otherwise in the video, but I haven’t been able to find it) is a huge negative. I guess I’m just getting a bit jaded by all the “me too” services now and am looking for some innovation with all this data we’re aggregating.

One thing that’s pretty evident is that since Plaxo has a pretty large user base and a very viral model. Their position in those regards may make it easier for them to get existing users to start Lifestreaming. That could go a long way on the path to make Lifestreaming mainstream. The other benefit is that with an existing network of contacts it could make for a compelling central location for all your friends to congregate and make it a destination of choice for Friendstreaming. Only time will tell.

Here’s Plaxo’s details of the Pulse functionality.

Here’s my Plaxo Lifestreaming Widget