Plaxo, the online address book is launching a social network aggregator, called Pulse, using the OpenID platform. The site is due to launch in the week beginning Aug 6 and will convert the accounts of Plaxo's claimed 15m registered members who already have online address books on the site, into a list of contacts organised around separate groups such as family and business. However, the newest feature will be a stream of RSS feeds from a range of popular sites such as Flickr and YouTube, which will list members' activities on those sites. Several blogs have compared this feature to Facebook's news feed, except Pulse will aggregate news from many different sites and will be open access.

Pulse will not be a conventional social network, but will tie together various services from across the web in an attempt to provide a single interface for aligning with the social feeds, email, contact, and calendaring applications business people use most. Forward to colleagues