The Next Web

Pulse integration with Mac is just the beginning

Written on January 16, 2008 – 6:50 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Pulse is now available for your Mac Address Book and takes care of all your syncing needs. The Plaxo service wants to stay an ‘useful social application that helps people stay connected’. In order to live up to that mission, integration with the Address Book was necessary, according to the press release: “Since most of our members are busy professionals, it’s not enough to enable communication just within the Pulse website; we need to bring Pulse – and the unified address book underlying it – to the communication tools, services, and devices that they use.”

Isn’t that against the trend of moving workspace from the desktop to the browser? We asked John McCrea, VP of Marketing. His answer: “We are working toward a vision of the ’social web’ in which the social graph is able to turbocharge any site, application, or device with users to take their local piece of the social graph with them wherever they go.”

So it’s basically a way of making sure that people have access to their contacts wherever they go. Until full wireless Internet coverage isn’t a dream anymore, this sounds like a plausible reason.

Yet I do think that this whole syncing thing also is a way to tempt people to move their workspace to online applications, such as Pulse. By giving people the feeling that their stuff ALSO remains on their computer, they’re willing to give the online application a try. So this won’t be the last integration tool we will hear of in the near future. What about Google Calendar syncing two-ways with iCal?

Pulse and Mac

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address book, Apple, google calendar, ical, plaxo, pulse, sync

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Plaxo Pulse: Netherlands Highest Growth Of ALL Countries

Written on December 4, 2007 – 9:37 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,

Since Plaxo launched its Plaxo Pulse service it has seen another surge in its growth. The last time Plaxo published its numbers was in 2006 when it reported 15 million active users after it doubled its userbase within 6 months. Since then it has launched its popular Pulse service and the first live OpenSocial implementation.

“Dutch pageviews jumped from 2% to 6% of total”

Last week John McCrea (vice president of marketing for Plaxo) contacted me with an interesting tidbit of information regarding the growth of Plaxo Pulse. It seems that in terms of adding new Pulse users the Netherlands has the highest growth rate of all countries. Dutch Pulse pageviews jumped from 2% of total to 6% of total in one week. As you can see in the graph here, it is highly likely that Dutch users will overtake the UK to become the second-largest userbase outside the US.

Plaxo Pulse Growth

Netherlands is light green; UK is dark yellow

There seems to be no special event that led to this sudden growth except the OpenSocial announcement by Google. However, the Netherlands is a very active social networking country with its largest social network (Hyves) adding its 5th million member somewhere this week.

growth, OpenSocial, plaxo, pulse

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