Plaxo Offers Pulse Plugin For Outlook
Plaxo has announced a new plugin that brings Plaxo Pulse to Microsoft Outlook. — Plaxo is claiming the new service is "historic;" its an extremely long stretch but this isn't to say that the functionality isn't interesting.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Outlook plugin is the latest step in Plaxo's 2007 reinvention from contact-sync utility into a social service. In June it shipped Plaxo 3.0, which fused the desktop PIM with the web address book and calendar, and explicitly targeted catch-up with LinkedIn and Facebook after its push into the social networking market.
Pulse itself has been gathering steam: Plaxo published early results arguing openness is good for business last month, and this plugin pushes that feed into the one client business users already live in. The move lands in contested territory — Xobni launched in September on the same premise of turning Outlook into a social network — and comes while Plaxo remains the subject of reported acquisition interest from Xing.
First-order effects
- Outlook users can now see Pulse activity streams inside their inbox, giving Plaxo distribution into the dominant corporate PIM rather than requiring a separate web visit.
- Plaxo deepens the desktop-web coupling it built with Plaxo 3.0, making the synced address book the delivery mechanism for its social feed.
Second-order effects
- Xobni, which staked its launch on socializing Outlook, now competes head-on with an established contact-sync vendor embedding its own feed in the same client.
- LinkedIn and Facebook face a rival whose growth loop runs through corporate email rather than consumer sign-ups, pressuring them to consider workplace-oriented integrations of their own.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the contact graph maintained inside email clients becomes a strategic asset in its own right — something acquirers like Xing would value, and the reason Plaxo keeps drawing takeover interest.
- Email clients risk becoming the default aggregation layer for professional social data, shifting the battle for business networking from standalone sites to wherever the address book lives.
The trend: Contact-management and PIM vendors are repositioning their synced address books as professional social networks, pushing activity feeds into email clients where business relationships already live.