Speaking of Plaxo and LinkedIn, it looks like some people at my former company actually listened to the moral of the Underpants Gnomes talk and launched Plaxo-LinkedIn integration as a premium feature (as well as a Labs section).

I tried it out and the first screen I got was a rejection because Safari isn’t supported. This is actually heartening since it’s about time Plaxo started to release stuff that wasn’t perfect.

The next step told me things were a one-way sync, so it’s really just an importer. I hope that this is a problem with LinkedIn’s end. It shows a nice status animation in both the top right and a candystripe bar.

Note to self: steal the animation in the top right for Ajaxian applications. Note to Plaxo: it’d be nice if the status bar actually updated.

[More Plaxo Sync Platform review after the jump.]

I chose “Sync and merge”:

It didn’t work out to well for me:

I should be honest here and say that nothing Plaxo does works quite right for me the first time. Apparently, I’m a really big edge case since my address book is corrupted with strange duplicates from nearly every previous Plaxo release and I do sync with everything under the sun (from Windows and Mac to Palm, cell phone and dotMac and iPod), including having messed with nearly every sync thing any engineer at Plaxo has written. (Yeah, I’m going to need Huy’s “New De-duper” in a big way.)

In any case, this doesn’t bother me since I wrote a little script to grab all my LinkedIn vcards and then osascript them to my Address Book (which then syncs with Plaxo). I then periodically export my vCards from the address book and upload them to LinkedI to search for new LinkedIn peeps.

Oh well, at least I had a chance to go to the new new Plaxo preview and sync my GMail, Yahoo! and AIM. As you can see, it didn’t do so well with Gmail (Cute status message, HipCal guys):

I can’t wait until Plaxo officially opens both the sync and access APIs for contacts and calendar.

Remembering uBlog

There is a buried feature in Plaxo that has been sitting there ever since I joined Plaxo three years ago called “microblog” (It’s now called “Card Message” because WTF is a “blog”?):

With the new Plaxo release schedule, an afternoon is all someone at Plaxo needs to write an interface with the Sync API that either blows away twitter or integrates with it. Given that it sits on both your public and personal cards, you even have some kick-ass access control.

I’m just sayin’…