Joseph Smarr, chief platform architect at Plaxo. Credit: Toby Burditt

Technology blogger Robert Scoble wanted help moving contact information for his 5,000 Facebook friends into his Microsoft Outlook address book. He turned to Joseph Smarr, chief platform architect at Plaxo, a company in Mountain View, CA, that synchronizes contact information between Outlook, other desktop e-mail programs, and a number of Web services. Smarr gave Scoble a short program to test out, which automati­cally paged through Scoble's Facebook connections and extracted the names, birthdays, and e-mail addresses of his friends.

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