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Plaxo has launched a brand new version of the popular online contact manager app as well as new and improved desktop clients. [Plaxo 3.0][1], as the company calls the updates, boasts a number of synchronization improvements and aims to be your one-stop address book and contact manager.
New features include find-as-you-type search and click to call buttons in the contact portion of Plaxo as well as a new calendar section that integrates Yahoo weather along side your schedule.
Also new is a content sharing system which allows you subscribe to friends content feeds as well as create your own feeds by pulling in data from popular web services. At the moment those services are limited to Flickr photos, Amazon wish lists and blog feeds, but Plaxo says support for more web services will be coming in the following months.
While the bells and whistles are nice the real news are the changes to core of Plaxo's synchronization options.
Having used Plaxo off and on for about a year, I was never that impressed with its functionality. Importers often choked and the desktop client was more intrusive than helpful, but I'm happy to report that the new version solves those issues.
Plaxo now offers an online "Sync Dashboard," which brings together multiple "sync points," such as Google Calendar, Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo, Mac OS X, AOL, Thunderbird, LinkedIn and even your mobile phone in one handy location.
And in my testing the synchronization worked perfectly, provided you give it time, since it's certainly no speed demon.
While the new Plaxo Dashboard provides an easy way to update contact info across various platforms (GMail is currently not supported, but Plaxo says it will be added soon), perhaps even more useful is the calendar synchronization.
I've never found an easy way to sync between Google Calendar and Apple's iCal, but Plaxo handles the two quite well and every change I made from either end was quickly reflected at the other end (and of course on Plaxo's own Calendar in the middle).
Other new features in the Plaxo desktop client for Mac include improved support for Mail.app. Plaxo now injects a small drop down menu at the top of each mail message to show whether or not the sender is in your address book. The menu then gives you options to add that person to your address book if they aren't already in it or, if they are, Plaxo will show their contact card.
Since the same thing can be accomplished by using Mail's built-in connections with Apple's Address Book, the Mail feature isn't totally necessary and can be turned off in the Plaxo system preference pane, but the contact card preview can come in handy.
Plaxo also support similar features in Thunderbird, but I haven't tested them.
But for all its strong points, Plaxo 3.0 has some serious drawbacks as well. I found the web interface buggy and slow in Firefox 2.0 (it was better in IE, Safari is not yet supported).
The Sync Dashboard frequently timed out or threw infinite loop redirect warnings and even when it did work, syncing was unacceptably slow. I have a meager 31 contacts in my address book and Plaxo took around five to seven minutes to update them, depending on which client I used to sync.
Also the links which should appear at the bottom of the main page for adding additional sync points didn't show up in Firefox (this seems to have been fixed as of 3:30pm).
However, once Plaxo works out the kinks (the service is officially still a public beta) they will indeed have the killer app for online contact info management especially for those that rely on a variety of different web services since Plaxo manages to make synchronization seamless.
In the meantime, if you'd like to check out Plaxo without having to sign up there's a nice demo video below from Plaxo.
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[1]: http://www.plaxo.com/info/corp/learn_more?t=1&f=landing "Plaxo 3.0"
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