Okay. So we are starting to make progress with calendar management. (If you want to find out when I'm free check http://andrewshuttleworth.com/cal). Next is contact management.
We are starting to see some progress. Services like www.ziggs.com and www.linkedin.com give you the option to put in your Yahoo! or Google ID and PW to automatically import your contacts. The LinkedIn toolbar has an option to quick reference the Linked in profile of a person (if their address is registered, and that is not predetermined) when using 'webmail' (& I haven't looked in to what services are supported).
But there are still issues:
- If you import once, what happens six months later when you import again, if you can be bothered. You have sync and conflict issues and things become a mess.
- Yahoo!, Google and Hotmail are all behind the times (at least for people who have a lot of contacts). Yahoo! only allows you to import X number of contacts at a time with an apparent total contact limit of 5000 and apparently no management of duplicates, Google just simply refuses to upload large files, and Hotmail (come on - this was a CSV file exported from MICROSOFT Outlook!) expects a file no bigger than 512 Kb (and a search of the MS KB offers no solution for splitting CSV or Excel files).
So basically things are still a mess and not working. But I'm optimistic. And I think the only company in the best position to really become a huge player in this field is Plaxo. Why?
- They seem to have good usage - more than any of the other contact management services that I have seen.
- They are not trying to be an SNS service ... so are not competing with any of the SNS services.
- They already offer solutions for Outlook, Outlook Express, Mac OS X, Mozilla Thunderbird, their own online and mobile solutions and support for Yahoo! (although the 5000 person contact limit still bugs me, even though I don't have 5000 contacts - just a result of multiple import attempts).
- They produce good quality products. I've been playing with PIM sync for years and their's is the first service that consistently produces usable services that work. They helped me get rid of 1000s of duplicates in a user friendly way. They were also relatively quick to support Outlook 2007 and Vista. Their Outlook toolbar has better contact search functionality than Outlook itself !!!!
So what do I think Plaxo should do? (Keep in mind this is the view of a 'play around on the web and just want things to work heavy user' opinion, and not a developer, industry expert or Plaxo investor one). They should implement a framework that allows all the SNS services to plug into their solution. www.ziggs.com, www.linkedin.com, www.ecademy.com, www.xing.com, www.myspace.com and the 10s if not 100s of others out there. Users are not going to - they simply can't - spend time managing their contacts in multiple services, yet all these services offer different value-adds. A universal sync solution is necessary and Plaxo is the only company I see that is in a position to offer this. Come on Plaxo!