A few months ago I signed up for Plaxo. Unlike most services I have signed up for in the past 2 years, Plaxo was not in beta. The funny thing is that I had sworn off Plaxo a long time ago. Ah how times change.
I remember when Plaxo cam on the scene in the late 90s. At the time I was living in Washington, DC, a place where building networks and knowing the right people is the #1 key to success. Lots of people were using Plaxo. Unfortunately, Plaxo had a bad habit of spamming all your friends. The whole thing just seemed sleazy to me.
The thing is, Plaxo is designed to help you keep track the people you know. As I started entering the same contacts into each “social network” that I signed up for, I started yearning for a central place to keep track of the people I know. Ideally it would be something that integrates with my AddressBook on my laptop (and therefor my phone). Enter Plaxo.
I want my “social network” to build in the course of my regular communications. I want to be able to receive and email, add the sender to my address book, and have them in my “social network”. Plaxo is poised to offer this. With the release that just went live, Plaxo is starting to do this. What do I mean? Well, now Plaxo can not only keep track of the contact information for your network, but it will also keep LinedIn in sync. So now, when I meet someone new and add them to my address book, Plaxo will see if they are in LinkedIn and make the connection for me. I am looking forward to more services (that I use) to be added.
The cool thing about the new Plaxo is that it not only allows me to keep track of who I know (and push that to other services), it also makes it easier for my contacts to keep up with me. Plaxo Pulse allows me to push content to Plaxo using RSS feeds (and photos via Flickr username). This could get very useful. Especially if they can integrate Pulse with my Mac in the same way that they integrated contacts with my Mac.
BTW, this is along the lines of what I will be talking about at BarCamp Nashville. Only, I will be talking about what will come next.
