Plaxo gets its sync on

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.

Plaxo-LinkedIn integration screen one

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”:

Plaxo-LinkedIn integration screen two

It didn’t work out to well for me:

Plaxo-LinkedIn integration fails

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.)

Plaxo’s New Deduper

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):

Plaxo Online 3. Iteration a zillion

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”?):

Plaxo Card Message

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’…

3 thoughts on “Plaxo gets its sync on

  1. Thanks for the write-up Terry. Actually the reason it took 40 seconds is because we forgot to add an index to one of our tables during deployment. That’s fixed now and it’s much faster. We had a few other configuration issues right when we deployed that probably caused the error messages you saw. If you want to do some QA for us, you could delete your current LinkedIn sync point and set it up again and let me know if anything goes wrong. 🙂 We’re still working out the last bugs–hey, that’s why it’s still a preview! 😉 Thanks, js

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