Plaxo Widget Brings LifeStreaming To The Masses
Plaxo’s Pulse social network aggregator is now offering an embeddable widget for those of you looking to jump on the “lifestream” bandwagon. Pulse, which is a social network in its own right, makes it easy to pull in data from a variety of sources — Flickr, Twitter, your blog and pretty much anything with an RSS feed — and view it all in one place.
The new Plaxo Pulse widget makes it easy to then embed that same stream of information in any site.
Rather than collecting and organizing all the data yourself, just feed it into Plaxo and pull it back out in a single widget.
The widget offers the option to limit the display to public feeds, or you can grab everything. Plaxo notes that for privacy protection, the new widget will not show contact info, comments, or connections. This initial release also does not include the items you’ve shared on Plaxo using the Share Bar.
I’ll confess I haven’t spent a lot of time using the actual Pulse pages, but I do find the service perfect for collecting data from other sites and then subscribing to the results in my RSS reader. That way I can easily track all my social network profiles across a multitude of sites in one central location (in my case Google Reader).
The new widget takes this basic strategy and gives casual users an easy way to take their data with them wherever they want. Of course with a bit of programming know-how you could already do this, but the new widget makes it much simpler.
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