Plaxo and LouderVoice

I was invited by Plaxo’s PR people to take a look at the new version of the product, version three. It’s somewhat unfash­ion­able to say it, but I have been a long-​​term user of Plaxo, so I was more than keen to give it a go. I should also disclose that they upgraded me to a premium account in order to check out all the new features.

Plaxo has been some­thing of a swear­word among bloggers and internet people for some time. It used to be famous for gen­er­ating huge amounts of spam as users incited their entire address book to join the service and to update their address book details. To be fair, this was as much down to users not knowing much about netiquette, as the company itself. While the system did encourage users to get their contacts up-​​to-​​date, by spamming their entire address book, it’s never sent out such requests of its own volition. Those features are still part of the service, but the lack of such requests in my mailbox would suggest that people have become more educated about their unpopularity.

If you’ve never used it, Plaxo is an address book online that can syn­chronise with your desktop address books in Outlook and so forth. The key reason to use it for me is that it’s let me move com­puters and jobs five or six times without losing a single contact. That’s a two-​​edged sword in some ways, since somehow I’ve ended up with around 1500 contacts.

So what’s new? Three quite important things for me. The first is that it can syn­chronise with more products. This now includes address books in Google Mail, Yahoo Mail, Live Hotmail, and most innov­at­ively, with Linked-​​In. I’ve never really worked on improving my Linked-​​In network, since I never look on it for contact details. However, I always agree to requests to connect from other people. That means that I’ve got a lot of ‘orphaned’ contacts on that system, that I can’t find when I look in my address book. Since I now work with ’ internet people’, contact via. Linked-​​In is becoming more common. A crisis was brewing. That’s now been resolved as Plaxo can grab your Linked-​​In contacts and put them in your proper address book. It’s a one-​​way process at the moment — you can’t populate your Linked-​​In network using Plaxo, though appar­ently that is on the cards as the richness of the former’s API increases. I asked about Facebook syn­chron­isa­tion and appar­ently that’s on the roadmap, but not yet.

Second quite important thing is cal­en­dars. It will syn­chronise my Outlook and Google cal­en­dars. That is a very good thing since I’ve his­tor­ic­ally main­tained separate work and home cal­en­dars and have never known what’s going on where unless I’m in that place. Even better, if you run more than one Google calendar, it will maintain their sep­ar­ate­ness when you syn­chronise with Outlook through the shared cal­en­dars feature.

The last important bit for me is that there’s a proper mobile version of the site. I must confess that I haven’t played with this much yet — my phone is a bit dinky for running internet apps — but I can cer­tainly imagine it being a lifesaver for those occa­sions when I know I’m going some­where to meet with some guy, but can’t for the life of me remember any more details.

There are some other goodies for premium users. The de-​​duper is pretty essen­tial when you start syn­chron­ising with a new source, oth­er­wise the system won’t recog­nise that ‘Dave Smith’ on Google is the same as ‘Smith, Dave’ on Outlook, and woe-​​betide should he be ‘David Smith’ else­where. However, once you’ve got your sources into the system and cleaned up, you probably won’t need it again. There’s also an e-​​cards service, but e-​​cards seem a bit 1990s to me.

The regular version of Plaxo remains free, but the premium version costs $50 a year. That’s quite a lot compared to premium services of other web apps, but if you fit into the demo­graphic that Plaxo’s aimed at — mobile or work from dif­ferent loc­a­tions, tons of contacts built up over many years, fairly hectic schedule — then the peace of mind may well be worth it.