Plaxo: its goods and can-be-betters

A while ago, I talked about a book I’ve read – Never Eat Alone, and about how important is is to keep in touch with the contacts, rather than just collect namecards. Then I got a comment from Melvin about Plaxo.

PlaxoI gave the piece of software a go. Well, I really liked the software, but there are some way Plaxo works that does not suit me very well.

Anyway, for the uninitiated, Plaxo is an online address book service, bundled with excellent software bits to synchronise your contacts wherever you store it – Outlook, LinkedIn, Thunderbird, Netscape… whatever so you always get the latest and most updated contact information from your friends, and so they do the same for you.

It is an excellent piece of software in doing this. For my first sync, I found 13 other contacts (okay, that is pathetic! :mrgreen: ) from my currently typed in list of about 300 contacts, who are also using the same service, and for some, I got to know their new phone numbers now, when I originally only knew only their email address.

However, one fallback I thought, was the inability to control what it syncs. For example, one of these 13 contacts is my buddy – and naturally being friends for almost half our lives, I have his address, mobile number, skype, MSN… and everything I know. But he wasn’t willing (or its probably too cumbersome) to list everything in his Plaxo profile, and the sync helped me remove this information I had about him.

So it in a sense “messed up” my address book again. I felt lucky that I had only 13 records to clean up. So, for Plaxo wanna-sign-ups – here is a potential challenge you might face. Again, it is an excellent service and piece of software for synochronising contacts, considering that it provides that for totally free, but some limitations need to be worked on.

On that note, does anyone know of any other services that do a similar thing that Plaxo is doing?

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