Plaxo breaks down social network walls

On most social network sites today, your personal data — personal profile, friend information and content feeds — can get in, but it can't get out.

To that end, a group of early social network users, vendors and developers last week posted the first draft of what they are calling a “Bill of Rights,” demanding that users be granted greater control over the personal information they contribute to social network sites. (You can read it at www.opensocialweb.org.)

“We think it's time for socially enabled Web sites to stop competing over who can build a higher wall to trap their users' data,” said Joseph Smarr, chief technology officer of vendor Plaxo and one of the four co-authors of the creed.

For Plaxo, social network openness isn't just a nice gesture — it's a business model. At its core, Plaxo lets customers upload and share their address books online. A new service, Pulse, lets users track activity across multiple social networks. This month, Plaxo also released open-source code, dubbed the Online Identity Consolidator, as a would-be standard for network information exchange — essentially the software behind the Bill of Rights vision.

With deals in place with Comcast and Verizon Wireless, Plaxo is both a pure-Web-play as well as a potential carrier partner. Networked address book services are an “excellent platform on which carriers can build a variety of value-added services,” said Ben Golub, CEO of Plaxo. “We can help carriers get past the [data] infrastructure piece as quickly as possible, letting them focus on providing new social services before their built-in advantages in that area evaporate.”