Plaxo aims to consolidate online identities

Plaxo, best known for its address book synch services, is targeting a major problem on the social Web with new software that allows users to more easily exchange personal data between different social networks.

Plaxo today released open source code for what it is calling an Online Identity Consolidator. Developers can embed this code into services such as social networks, blogs and photo sites to automate the exchange of identity data and, ultimately, content.

For instance, a user could list (in lingo, “publicly assert”) on their blog or home page the networks to which they belong. The software would then automatically exchange identity, content and social network data among those services.

That data exchange function allows users to more easily manage membership in multiple social networks. It unlocks social network data and allows users to freely take their personal data and content from service to service. And it makes those services “aware” of one another, creating a mesh of content that represents a user’s online life in its totality.

“How do you give users control back over the social Web that they are interacting with?” asked Joseph Smarr, chief platform architect for Plaxo, in a video on Scobleizer.com pre-announcing the new software. “At the core it’s just basically letting you have some control to tell your friends what sites you are using that they can follow you on.”

Plaxo began its life helping users keep their address books up-to-date, drawing criticism for at times barraging those users’ friends and colleagues with e-mails to add or update their personal information. The company toned down those requests and of late has moved aggressively to carve out a position as the “Switzerland” of the social Web. For instance, its recently announced Pulse service lets Plaxo users pull in data from across various social networks and aggregate it on a single page.

Plaxo said it will make use of the application programming interfaces and formats of its new Online Identity Consolidator software to make Pulse a more flexible service. But, ultimately, the consolidator is less about pulling content together than letting identity-based content proliferate and synch among different services, according to Smarr.

To enable this data sharing, Plaxo said it implemented the software using a variety of Web standards, including iCal, OpenID, SyncML and the XFN microformat. It is making the source code and other tools for working with the software available at opensocialgraph.plaxo.com.