Goodbye Plaxo!

Well, it’s been 2 years and almost 3 months since I joined Plaxo and this Friday I’ll be moving on. Over the past two years, we’ve done a ton of stuff at Plaxo, including:

• Launched the Plaxo-AIM integration
• Shipped the Plaxo Toolbar for Thunderbird
• Had Plaxo join the Mac faithful
• Got on Verizon’s deck for mobile sync
• Released a new version of Plaxo WAP access
• Integrated with Comcast
• Expiremented on Plaxo Labs
• Built Plaxo 3.0

I’ve really enjoyed my time at Plaxo – I’ve learned a lot, shipped a ton of product, and worked with amazing people.

As for my next gig, I’ll be joining my good friend Terry over at Tagged. There’s a ton of stuff to do over there – and since they’re in PHP/Java, I can probably jump in and do some coding too . Lunch 2.0 up in SF here we come!

So… should I continue writing my blog here at Plaxoed? I suppose it is past tense, so it could fit as I move on after Plaxo. What do you guys think?

Quick Plaxo update

Whew, there’s a whole lot of stuff going on at Plaxo. Here’s a recap:

• We launched LinkedIn import to Plaxo – People have been asking us to do some integration with LinkedIn for a long time; we’ve finally gotten around to starting that work. Hopefully it’ll be even tighter soon! (btw, there’s a Lunch 2.0 @ LinkedIn next week, RSVP and come on by for free food!)
• Got Plaxo working for Thunderbird 2.0
• Launced Plaxo Labs, where we’ve got a whole bunch of new stuff for people to check out.
• Our Comcast partnership was announced! Yes, that’s right, we are going to be powering the address book for Comcast. (btw, if you’re currently a Plaxo member and a Comcast High Speed Internet subscriber, you can get Plaxo Premium for free by going here)

One of my personal favorite labs features is Plaxo Search. Basically, you sign-in (check “Remember me on this computer” if you’re on a personal machine) and you get a Google-like interface to search for anything you have in your Plaxo account. You can also hook it up to your browser’s search box in the top right (if you have IE7 or Firefox). It looks like this:

Give it a try; it’s the fastest way to get access to your contacts, calendar, tasks, and notes by far!

Your Outlook calendar or Mac Address Book on your dumbphone

On the Plaxo front, we’re testing out an early release of Plaxo Mobile 3.0, a new WAP access product (direct link). Built on WAP 2.0/XHTML, this app allows you to get access to all your Plaxo contacts, calendar, tasks, and notes from the web browser on your mobile phone. If you already have a Plaxo account and you can’t wait, just point your mobile browser to http://labs.plaxo.com/mobile.

This means you can sync your Outlook, Mac, Thunderbird, or Yahoo! address books to Plaxo and then access it on your mobile phone. (Well, you’ll still have to pay for wireless internet charges, but come’on, don’t you have an unlimited data plan on your cell phone by now?)

If you’ve got questions, run into trouble while trying it out, or want to give feedback, please feel free to contact me, join our Google Group, or e-mail the team at labs-mobile@plaxo.com.

New Plaxo coming soon! Sign up for early access…

Woohoo, we’re getting close to releasing a major revision to Plaxo and we’re now collecting a list of people for our early access preview. If you’d like to check out what we’ve been working on, click through to Rikk’s latest blog post on the Plaxo blog.

What’s included?

• A completely new version of Plaxo Online
• Localized for various languages
• Expanded list of “sync points” (including Google, Yahoo!, and Hotmail)
• An innovative new online calendar
• A few other surprises

Hope to see you in the beta

If you use Yahoo Mail for personal e-mail (like me) and Outlook for your corporate e-mail (like me), you can now sync your data between the two with an easy web interface. Plus, you’ll also be able to access it from a completely revamped, AJAXy Plaxo online.

So go ahead and send an e-mail to privatebeta@plaxo.com and we’ll let you know when we’re ready to let people in

In Austin for SXSW

I’m flying out to Austin tomorrow for SXSW. It’s not my first time in Austin, but it’ll be my first time at SXSW. If you’re there too, drop me a line and we’ll meet up at a panel or something. Also, check out the cool new business cards we got printed up:

Find me if you want one

You’ll notice on the back that I’ve got a cool MyPlaxo page at http://markjen.myplaxo.com. Soon, all Plaxo members will be able to get one (and it’ll always have your latest info). Basically, the first step in replacing the traditional business card which gets outdated all the time anyways. Hey! That’s what Plaxo was created for

Sweet Web 2.0 videos (Plaxo included)

A bunch of people here at the office have been shooting a “superbowl” ad over the past few days and they’ve just been uploaded to YouTube. HEre’s ours (I think it’s hilarious, but then again, I’m probably biased):

Check out all of the videos over there. Meebo, RockYou, Technorati, and other companies have submitted videos too.

I wish Microsoft Academy existed

Mini-MSFT has a post up about an idea he had – starting a 3 month bootcamp for people when they’re hired at Microsoft he calls “Microsoft Academy”. I think that’s a great idea, and one that many other industries/companies have had for a long time. If they implemented this and they accepted high school students, that would be awesome.

Wait a second, did I say high school students? Yup. For me, spending 3 years at University of Michigan to get a B.S.E. in Computer Engineering was mostly a waste of time. I learned a lot about low level computer architecture, but as far as software is concerned, I already knew half of it and the other half I would’ve been able to pick up in a few weeks anyways. (And of course, it turns out I haven’t worked in the hardware industry yet)

Now, if there was a Microsoft Academy and I could’ve enrolled in that out of high school, I would’ve been all set – technically that is. Socially… well, I’m still probably not quite there

Little tool to extract all files out of Sharepoint

We’ve been using Microsoft Sharepoint here at Plaxo to organize our projects and files. For those who have used Sharepoint, you know it’s a love/hate relationship

Anyways, we needed to get a copy of all the files in our Sharepoint site recently. Looking around on the web, we found a few solutions, but couldn’t really find one that did exactly what we wanted. So, I wrote up a quick little app to grab all the files we needed out of Sharepoint, while preserving Sharepoint’s directory structure. It’s a command line tool and it doesn’t have any options.

It’s really not that hard; here’s the source in case you’re interested:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Data;
using System.Data.SqlClient;
using System.IO;
 
// replace this string with your Sharepoint content DB connection string
string DBConnString = “Server=YOURSHAREPOINTSERVER;Database=CONTENTDATABASE;Trusted_Connection=True;”;
 
// create a DB connection
SqlConnection con = new SqlConnection(DBConnString);
con.Open();
 
// the query to grab all the files.
// Note: Feel free to alter the LeafName like ‘%.extension’ arguments to suit your purpose
SqlCommand com = con.CreateCommand();
com.CommandText = “select DirName, LeafName, Content from Docs where (LeafName like ‘%.doc’ or LeafName like ‘%.xls’ or LeafName like ‘%.pdf’ or LeafName like ‘%.ppt’) and Content is not NULL”;
 
// execute query
SqlDataReader reader = com.ExecuteReader();
 
while (reader.Read())
{
    // grab the file’s directory and name
    string DirName = (string)reader["DirName"];
    string LeafName = (string)reader["LeafName"];
 
    // create directory for the file if it doesn’t yet exist
    if (!Directory.Exists(DirName))
    {
        Directory.CreateDirectory(DirName);
        Console.WriteLine(“Creating directory: “ + DirName);
    }
 
    // create a filestream to spit out the file
    FileStream fs = new FileStream(DirName + “/” + LeafName, FileMode.Create, FileAccess.Write);
    BinaryWriter writer = new BinaryWriter(fs);
 
    // depending on the speed of your network, you may want to change the buffer size (it’s in bytes)
    int bufferSize = 1000000;
    long startIndex = 0;
    long retval = 0;
    byte[] outByte = new byte[bufferSize];
 
    // grab the file out of the db one chunk (of size bufferSize) at a time
    do
    {
        retval = reader.GetBytes(2, startIndex, outByte, 0, bufferSize);
        startIndex += bufferSize;
 
        writer.Write(outByte, 0, (int)retval);
        writer.Flush();
    } while (retval == bufferSize);
 
    // finish writing the file
    writer.Close();
    fs.Close();
 
    Console.WriteLine(“Finished writing file: “ + LeafName);
}
 
// close the DB connection and whatnots
reader.Close();
con.Close();

Here’s my VS.NET 2005 project file. If you need help with the code, please let me know.

Plaxo Mobile Plus is the #1 download

on Verizon’s Get it Now Business Tools section anyways

If you’ve downloaded it and have tried it out, contact me and let me know how it’s going for you. We’re the #3 download overall:

Plaxo now syncs with mobile phones (at least on Verizon)

Yesterday we launched Plaxo Mobile Plus on our first mobile carrier – Verizon. If you have a Verizon phone, go to “Get It Now” -> “Get Going” -> “Buisness/Tools” and try out Plaxo Mobile Plus (it should be available on most phones). Plaxo Mobile Plus actually provides full sync between your phone and Plaxo, which means you can now connect your mobile phone up to Outlook, Outlook Express, Mac, Thunderbird, IE, Yahoo, and AIM – and you can also get access to your info on Plaxo Online too. Wow, that’s a lot of sync endpoints

After you download it, you’ll be greeted with a nice splash screen:

And here’s the app in action:

There are quite a number of features in there including:

• Select which contacts you want to sync to your phone’s native address book
• See any contact’s full contact details (including addresses, e-mail addresses, etc.)
• Getting a map of a contact’s address
• Sending an e-mail or SMS to the contact

Ack, too bad I’m on Cingular. I’ll just have to wait until we roll out for our next carrier

and if you try out Plaxo Mobile Plus, please do drop me a line and let me know what you think!