No, it's not a kind of mouthwash. Plaxo is an online address book that syncs with Outlook, Thunderbird and Apple Address Book. You never need to ask your contacts for updated contact details again. All they need to do is install Plaxo as well and your address book will always be up to date with their latest contact details. Vice versa, your details will always be up to date in their address books as well.
Brilliant! So why does Plaxo suck? Eric Edelstein and I were chatting the other day, when he mentioned how cool it would be to have an app like the one described above. He mentioned all the features it should have, and I thought hey,
So why has Plaxo faded away?
One of the main things mentioned in other blogs is the infamous 'Plaxo Spam'. Plaxo will send out update requests to everyone on my address book who does NOT have Plaxo. Until they join, that is. Basically, they tried to spam you into joining!
This seems to have raised the ire of a lot of people, and it backfired hugely for Plaxo.
But why would it backfire for Plaxo, but not Facebook, which does the same thing? Facebook will also look through your address book and send invites to all your contacts who aren't on Facebook yet.
The difference seems to be Facebook simply asks your friends to 'Join'.
Plaxo, on the other hand, asks your friends to 'Update their Details'. They don't need to join. So the first time you do this with pleasure using the attached form. The 2nd time you get a little annoyed and by the 3rd time you probably join Plaxo or you simply ignore future messages from the service. Most people chose the latter.
Ironically, Plaxo did it this way so it would be less annoying. It wouldn't force your friends to join.
I suspect what happened was that people were introduced to Plaxo by being asked to do something for Plaxo. Plaxo did nothing for them in return. It would have been better if Plaxo simply asked you to join a few times, "so that your friends will always have your most up to date contact information and you will have theirs".
Unfortunately, it seems it's mostly Game Over for Plaxo already, unless Google buys them and revamps the product and their drab-looking website. I for one hope that a young programmer working from his bedroom will take the charge and build an online address book that not only syncs with Outlook, but also integrates with Facebook!
UPDATE: Plaxo 3.0 was released today with a whole host of new features. I'll give it a thorough spin and report back soon.
UPDATE 2:So far the Plaxo Assistant for OS X is using more than 500MB of my 1GB of RAM, causing a massive slowdown! It also creates a new duplicate for calendar entries in iCal every time it syncs.
6 comments:
Well, if having 15 million members and singing a major integration/distribution deal with Comcast equals dead, then somebody please kill me!
Good point Anon,
I suspect though that many (if not most) of those 15 million members are like myself. They signed up but then stopped using it.
Only about 50 of my 1073 contacts are Plaxo members.
Regarding Facebook (we had the discussion earlier if I recall).
The only thing that you can't access through the Facebook API is your friends contact details (because that's where FB makes their money). Sooo, you can't use it as an address book.
btw, when are you moving over to Wordpress? Blogger sucks...
Going to have to walk around with an NDA in the future...
Tx Henk for writing this posting and tibby.dude for commenting...
Coz of this posting, I got to chat to Scoble himself.
Facebook has 52 million users! MySpace had 100 million users as of LAST YEAR. Plaxo has 15 million since 2003 and most are inactive by most accounts. What a joke of a company. Sell out or shut down already. Oh yeah, and stop spamming!
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