Wouldn’t it be great to see at a glance the latest happenings in a person’s life right as you were about to send them an mail? That’s the promise of the historic integration within Outlook and Plaxo Pulse.

Why “historic”? considering we are in the very early days of what I shout the “Social Web,” an era in which the open web is fundamentally transformed by capabilities initially developed inside popular (but closed) social networks. The tidal wave of apps developed for the Facebook platform point to the hidden value that can be unlocked when applications are socially-enabled. But what whether, instead of widgetizing apps to connect them with the “social graph”, you turned the view around, and brought “social” to applications? That’s the concept behind the latest release of the Plaxo Toolbar for Microsoft Outlook…

We’ve integrated Pulse into the newsletter system that most of us use at work. What does that mean? Now, you can see recent activity on a person’s Pulse stream in the Plaxo “Click to Connect” box and in

This mashup makes it really easy to:

- See what the person is sharing on a large and growing list of sites, including blogs, Digg, Twitter, del.icio.us, Flickr, Yelp, and dozens of others
- go by to see a person’s full profile and subject matter stream on Pulse
- Keep growing your network based on who you’re communicating with via Outlook

That’s all in addition to the other things you can do with Click-to-Connect (as a outcome of previous mashups we did amidst Outlook, Plaxo, and the web), such as:

- “Google” the person with a one click
- Get a map or directions
- Initiate a VOIP signal on a regular phone with a loner click

If you’re already using Pulse, download the new toolbar for Outlook here. whether you’re not yet a member, get your explanation set up first.

John McCrea
VP of Marketing

Orginal post by john