Plaxo 3.0 Beta

Mood: First day at work after the holidays ;)

There is quite many social national and international social networks. I use the most often LinkedIn as the most popular one and also the one, which I enjoy. I have some accounts in the other(s), but I visit them just once per a month or couple of months, when I get some invitation from them. I have made lastly the exception to have a closer look at Plaxo and I must say I have been positively surprised.

Unlike LinkedIn, which is turning more into hiring market and Question & Answer services, the Plaxo has the aspiration to become the integration/synchronization bus, which allows to track humans activities across all the existing services via Pulse. This includes not only the Social Networks, but also Photo Sharing, bookmarking, bloginning etc.

Everything in one place, as far as the service base on the open standard! With the pulse stream service you keep the information about all the actions/changes, which happened among your social network in the area – something like mega RSS :)

Some of these things are actually similar to LinkedIn functionalities, but with the fresher approach. For example… Instead informing you that your firend X get 5 new connections (LinkedIn), it says that your friend X connected to person Y. Furthermore, you do not need to know the email address of person Y or prepaid SendIn Email service (LinkedIn) to invite the person to your social network. The other example are groups, which are not so restricted like in LinkedIn – generally everybody may establish it for free and communication possibilities within it are much richer.

Actually Plaxo has the aspiration to become the key service to integrate not only all your contacts (professional, personal and family), but also the other Outlook type of information like Calendar, Tasks and notes. The sample approach of how it is achieved for calendar events you may watch at this demo. Unfortunately the Sync with LinkedIn is free, just for first 30 days :( Later you will need to pay 50$ per a year.

It is also visible in some moments that the service is still in beta version, when it frozes once per a while on loading the data…

It provides also the cool Outlook plugin. As Plaxo is different from LinkedIn, it provides within its toolbar mostly the synchronization options, but there is also "Send eCard" thing. Within a package you get also the signature editor, which allows to create the nice footer to your emails. What is not so easy to do within Outlook, is much easier with Plaxo wizard. Futhermore there a cool feauture next to each email, which allows you to do couple of actions related to person, who send you the email. Again, except the standard one like "Invite" or "send eCard", there is "Google [the person]" ;)