Review: Don't leave home without Plaxo

Computerworld - Have you heard of Plaxo? There's been a lot of buzz about it this week, because Plaxo Inc. unveiled new features for its namesake product on Monday.

Many people know Plaxo as a synchronizer, automater and organizer of contact information. Others are discovering Plaxo's new role as a social network.

The best thing about Plaxo, however, is that it's an incredibly powerful enabler for mobile computing. Plaxo can keep you in the loop while you're on the road. I'll tell you about Plaxo's mobile features shortly. But first, here's a brief account of the basic services available from the company that brings you Plaxo.

What is a Plaxo, anyway?

Plaxo offers a range of products and services that perform personal information synchronization and auto-maintenance. You tell Plaxo where you store your contacts, calendar and other personal information, and it syncs it all together. It then lets other people update their own information, usually via e-mail and Web, so you don't have to. Plaxo products available free of charge include Plaxo Online and tool bars for Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Internet Explorer and Mac OS X.

The company also sells certain services, including Plaxo Premium, Plaxo eCards and Plaxo Mobile.

For this review, I tested Plaxo Premium, which is essentially the free Plaxo Online, plus a contact de-duper, unlimited Premium eCards, help with data recovery, mobile phone access to contacts, calendar, notes, tasks and Pulse -- its new social networking feature. It also includes phone support and the ability to store more than 1,000 contacts. The premium service costs $49.95 per year.

You find people in Plaxo by just entering their e-mail address or AOL Instant Messenger name. By clicking a button, they're added to your address book, which is then synced with whichever other address books you have, such as Outlook.

In earlier versions, Plaxo got something of a bad reputation because it encouraged you to spam friends, relatives and colleagues with invitations to join and to update contacts. Plaxo unveiled a new version (3.0) in June, which is much improved from a privacy standpoint. It's also more automated.

Plaxo used to support Google Calendar Sync. It didn't work well, though, so it was discontinued. As of yesterday, it's back. And now it works.

Now Plaxo has a Pulse

This week, Plaxo entered an entirely new arena with its Pulse social networking feature.

Pulse isn't a separate thing but, rather, an additional tab on the Plaxo Online and Plaxo Premium site. Unlike other social networking services, such as Facebook, MySpace or Linked-In, Pulse is based on a mashup of both contact changes and activity on other sites.