Monday, July 9, 2007

The incredible Plaxo(.com)

Are you looking for a (FREE) central place where aggregate all of your various contact lists, mail address books, calendars and so on?
Well, you've found it: Plaxo.com is a service I have been trying from a couple of weeks.
It has been launched from a certain amount of time (they are rockin' around from 2002) and some weeks ago they came out with a completely redesigned interface ("Plaxo 3", still in beta for now).

They let you aggregate and organize contacts and calendars from MSN/Hotmail, Outlook (Express), Mac OS X, Google Calendar, AOL/AIM, Yahoo!, LinkedIn and others.

I'm using it to store and manage the following stuff:
1. Google Calendar
2. My Mozilla Thunderbird contacts, which I synchronize with Plaxo by installing an awesome plug-in in Thunderbird
3. My MSN contacts (note that I don't actually have a Hotmail account, but a Passport.NET one...)

Since I'm sure my contacts and calendars can grow at every moment of the day (since I use many ways to contact people, above all for work reasons), now I am also sure that Plaxo will always provide to me a central place where all of these informations will be consistent and accessible every-where (this last one is my concept of "informations portability", kindly provided by Big-Mama Internet).

Since using it or seeing it used by someone else is the best way to get familiar with it, there a video illustrating how it works.

Finally, the best thing about Plaxo is that they are improving everyday the new interface and adding new features: first of all performances are getting better everyday; after that, the past week I tried to import my MSN contacts (Remember? My Passport.NET account...) and, well, that day it didn't work for me, so I wrote a "request-for-features" asking if they were to implement importing my MSN Messenger only contacts without passing through a "real" Hotmail account.
Amazingly they answered me within hours and it wasn't a machine-compiled mail! They said there were some features they're considering to implement.
Today, after just 1-2 weeks I contacted those guys, I successfully imported my MSN Messenger contacts!

So, I definitively love Plaxo.

No comments:

Post a Comment