Plaxo Review

I recently registered with Plaxo.

The basic service is free, and is simple in concept, you can import your address and contact information from a number of sources, and if any of your contacts are registered with Plaxo, you are automatically updated with their contact details, when they change them.

The service is good, but not perfect as far as I can tell.

I’m lucky -about half the people I know seem to already be registered. However, about half of them aren’t up to date. If Plaxo can’t convince people to stay up to date, the service is somewhat less useful.

You can click a button to get Plaxo to email people to persuade them to update their entries. But the email that arrives looks like spam, and I think a lot of people just ignore the requests as they aren’t personal, they look like Amazon newsletters, you know, the ones you tend to ignore.

You can edit a contacts information so that it differs from the information they have specified. Which sounds daft, but as I say, some people forget to update their profiles. However, only if you install the Outlook plugin, can you see where the two differ. Which seems like a pretty major oversight for a web service. I only figured out that my entry for one contact was empty in the end using the Outlook plugin. Then I could click a button to prefer the contact’s info over my 30 inexplicably blank fields.

My mum’s Plaxo is more up to date than mine because she has edited the info when appropriate. But there is no way for me to sync with her address book. I would like to see her contacts, and click for the ones to import. Even the premium paid service doesn’t offer this, but it seems like an obvious choice.

About three quarters of the people I emailed to get them to join didn’t. And I can see why. You can import from Outlook, but it’s a convoluted process involving exporting to CSV file and uploading to a web form. If you don’t import you start with nothing. Why can’t I offer my invited colleague my Plaxo address book to pick and chose from?

Privacy is handled well. To start with you can only request information from people you know. They can choose to let you see their work and home information, either one, the other, both or even neither.

So to sum up, a good service, provided your contacts are already on Plaxo, or that you can persuade them to join. Some issues exist such as determining if you actually have the correct contact information when just using the website. Some features would help to rapidly expand the number of people who are registered, ie. make it 10 times easier to join and set up your contact database. And finally, the premium service doesn’t really offer anything worth paying for, which is a pity as I have money and like what they provide for free.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 27th, 2006 at 14:50 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.