As a user of Plaxo, I've been delighted with their Pulse service for a while now. Bloglines is a really great start at letting me keep up with things, but Pulse fills an important gap where Bloglines leaves off. Why do I trust my personal data to a service like this? For starters, Plaxo is working on the open social network graph initiatives which I feel are going to be tremendously important. Your social connections are your data, no matter what other services might want to believe (or have you believe on their behalf). That they "get it" on this front says a lot about who's building the service.

When Pulse launched as a part of the new Plaxo Online app, I was excited to see Dojo throughout. At launch the main UI had been 0.4.x while pulse was way ahead in adopting 0.9. Last week Joseph Smarr dropped a note in my Pulse stream to let me know that all of Plaxo Online is now using Dojo 0.9, and you can really feel the difference. In conjunction with the downright beautiful UI touches the app uses JavaScript to enhance the user experience in some really great ways. From virtual scrolling and live search for contacts, to "roll up" week views in the calendar, to great Ajax-driven editing the whole thing just "feels" good and amazingly responsive. Better yet, it puts all the stuff I care about in one UI and makes it people-centric, which is what matters.

Hats off to the team over at Plaxo for the amazing experience they've built and the thought that went into making it not just flashy and beautiful, but also humane and insanely useful.