I’ve got to admit that when I began seeing Robert Scoble posts to the Facebook newsfeed late last week about the upcoming new version of Plaxo he’d been playing with and that was due out Monday (today), my curiosity was aroused.
I recall my first invite to join Plaxo from former Latin Venture co-worker Megan Crowe way back in, hmmm, must have been late-2001 or early-2002. At the time, with massive e-mail churn of former friends and colleagues who were leaving their jobs (whether by special invitation or just fed up and moving on) during and after the Web 1.0 bubble burst, I thought it was a great idea and managed to build up a modest network that kept contacts alive for some time.
But, I eventually became annoyed — and I see in my annoyance I was in good company, with Charles Arthur, among obviously many others! The constant requests to synch Outlook Contacts or respond to requests for updates from contacts who were moving about fairly frequently at the time just became more hassle than help. And, moving laterally a couple of times myself and not wanting to trumpet to the world via Plaxo that I’d moved until I was well settled into the new post, I eventually stopped using Plaxo. Even wiped all the old, fallow contacts, though I left my account intact.
This morning, I went to Scoble’s post about Plaxo 3.0 and to the video he had posted from Plaxo VP for Marketing John McCrea, explaining the new Plaxo platform, which as I understand is Ajax-enabled and totally revamped as a kind of Web 2.0 mashup that can run quite independently of your Outlook and allows you to synch contacts and calendar with just about every application out there — Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Outlook, AOL/AIM, Mac OSx (and iphone, I assume) MSN Hotmail/Windows Live, and LinkedIn — for a premium price increase, of course. (Apparently, there is also a 1,000 contact limit on the free service, after which you need to sign up for the $49 premium service.)
Most interesting to me, however, is a new “Plaxo Pulse” function that links it into the Web 2.0 world of social networking, functioning much like the Facebook news update scroll as a feed of various content generators and letting you see in near real-time your the status updates, application downloads, or Twitter posts from within Facebook by your connected “friends” — will enable you to monitor from one Plaxo browser window online content being created by your Plaxo contacts every day — including their blogs, profile updates, photo uploads, etc. That said, I don’t yet see Facebook or Twitter listed among the content generating apps, so I’m assuming that Plaxo is waiting for someone to write a hack for Facebook and Twitter or just keep the news coming with new features added on the run (which is what I’d do if I were running their PR).
If this turns out to be anything like what is being promised, it could really address the frustration of having to manage all those various social networking browser windows and button downloads. I’m also assuming that, as McCrea says, they’ve addressed the irritating spam-like update requests in this new version. I’ve just uploaded contacts and will be trying it out over the coming days. If they have managed to come close to allowing me to bridge to all contacts I need from all my various Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo!Mail and Hotmail contacts lists from work ad home, plus access all the social/business networking site feeds I want, all from one browser window … this could be the monster mash-up I’ve been longing for!
E-mail this
Save to del.icio.us
Digg This!
