what is plaxo?

a lot of people have been wondering what plaxo does. by now, most people have, at some time or another, gotten a request to update their contact information from a friend through plaxo. oftentimes, as plaxo spreads through a social group, those who join plaxo last end up getting sent a large number of these contact info update requests. these people naturally – and unfortunately – mistake plaxo for a spam company 😦

what plaxo actually does is harness the power of social networking to keep your contacts up to date. if you and all of your friends are signed up for plaxo, when someone moves, they only need to update their info in plaxo. plaxo then automatically sends the updated info to everyone in the group – to make it even smoother, the people in the group don’t need to do anything; their address books are just always up to date. for me, the only contact info i have left for most of my college friends is an e-mail address. fortunately, with just an e-mail address, i can quickly reconnect with all of my friends and keep in touch effortlessly.

the best part is, if you use outlook or outlook express, plaxo has a client plug-in. this plug-in will automatically keep your outlook contacts up to date too. there are also cool features that help you keep your calendar, tasks and notes synced up. if you have multiple computers, you can install plaxo on all of them and your information can be synced automatically.

they also have a really cool web interface and an IE toolbar in the works – it’s got integrated yahoo search too, so you don’t need a search toolbar anymore (don’t worry, they haven’t put in an autolink feature… yet ;P).

what about privacy concerns? well, plaxo, unlike other social networks, is very concerned about privacy. first of all, you choose what information other people can see and get updated from you. also, no one ever knows who is in your address book unless you tell them they are. plaxo isn’t a spamhouse so they aren’t interested in selling your information; plus, even though you only get e-mailed by plaxo when one of your friends requests it, you can still opt-out and you won’t receive any more e-mails from plaxo.

hope that answers most questions. if you want to keep in touch with me, just add my e-mail to your plaxo account (it’s 99zeros at gmail).

for the doubters out there, don’t worry, i haven’t drunk too much corporate kool-aid; check out the product and i think you’ll see why i am so excited to be working here 🙂