Plaxo, the Mountain View-based address book startup that makes news every once in a while, announced its launch of Pulse today. Pulse adds a perspective of social networking/microblogging to what has so far been a one-dimensional address book management service. You can check out Pulse in a tab in Plaxo’s 3.0 beta launch.
In ways a mashup of hot microblogging services Pownce, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter and Jaiku, Pulse lets you gather content from different sources — like your Flickr photos, Amazon list, blog, and YouTube uploads — and publish/share that content to your own ‘personal network.’ A personal network is a set of people which you can create and define, which very much resembles Pownce’s overall idea.
Pulse is a really interesting move deploying a lot of cool trends and features that have springing up in the past couple months, and that’s coming from a company which’s original aim consisted of building upon the very 1.0 concept of address books. In the end, it all ties in, and as they define it, Pulse is about ‘bringing life to your address book.’
Since, I’m not a Plaxo user (or have any of my contacts using it), I was unable to give it a good whirl myself, but this page has pretty much everything there is to know about it. The new offering from Plaxo, in ways, will take the declining startup to a new direction, and we’ll be able to see the outcome in a few months. Is the whole idea information overload? That’s for you to explain to your mother. 
It’s encouraging to see that Plaxo’s Pulse is using OpenID for their sign-in system.
But it’s not enough.
Ask anyone who’s a regular Social Networker what they principle irritation is when it comes to social websites and I’d wager it’s putting in all of their stuff .. every single time they sign up to something new…
This feature in plaxo is more like a multimedia share thing with options that you can do with it while viewing or sharing that will ‘bringing life to your address book.’