Google’s OpenSocial has been both laughed at and fawned over as people have debated if it has any value. The discussion will, by and large, continue, but the people at Plaxo have already decided that OpenSocial is extremely good.
In an entry on Plaxo’s blog, Vice President of Marketing John McCrea presents a graph and writes, “Of particular note: the inflection point in the curve coincides with the public revelation of the Google OpenSocial initiative and our role in it. From that moment forward, we have experienced a surge so strong that we had to expedite a hardware order, and shift focus temporarily from new features to scalability.”
Think he’s kidding? According to the graph, the number of Plaxo Pulse’s “connections” grew by about 800 percent between October 31st and November 14th. That sort of thing is easily a marketer’s dream (and a tech guy’s nightmare).
The problem is, though, that Plaxo isn’t MySpace or Facebook. Upon seeing that Plaxo had joined OpenSocial – and the average person didn’t see this, mind you – folks may have thought, “Hey, I remember that old thing. I believe I’ll see how it’s doing.” The more major social networks already have people interested in them, and so probably won’t see as much of a publicity bump.
Meh. We’ll see how this all plays out soon enough – comScore and Hitwise will likely weigh in, and if other companies have had any success, they can be counted on to mention it, as well.
