I think Plaxo may be one of the most useful Web 2.0 tools out there – I totally love it! I’ve been using it for over a year now and it has once again come in extremely handy.
In order to fully utilize Plaxo though, you’ve got to have your address book on your mobile phone synching up with the address book that Plaxo updates. For me, I’m using a Treo 700W running Pocket PC, Exchange for mail/contact/calendar hosting/synching provided by 4Smartphone and Outlook (and until recently, Entourage on my Mac) with 4Smartphone pulling mail from 6 pop accounts. Basically, this setup means that my webmail, Cell Phone, desktop, PC laptop and Mac laptop are all kept in synch – no matter what I do on one of them, it’s done to all of them.
So, here’s where the beauty of Plaxo comes in – whenever one of my contacts who use Plaxo updates their phone number in Plaxo, Plaxo pushes the changes to me via Email which forces a change to their phone number in my contacts. That change is then synched up through my Exchange hosting and pushed to my phone. Effectively, what this means is that when Ryan Money changes his phone number on Plaxo, if I call him 5 minutes later I’ll be calling him on his new phone number without me EVER realizing that his number changed! Because everything is being updated by Plaxo and then synched all the way to my phone, not only do I not have to update his number, it gets updated without me having to be aware of it….. BEAUTIFUL!
So, yesterday I got a new phone number which I updated in Plaxo. I received 2 phone calls today on that new number from friends that had no idea my phone number had changed. And THAT is why I love Plaxo!
