John Lacey

I have been a longtime faithful champion of the website that is Plaxo.com. At the time it seemed a really wonderful way of organising my contacts (especially in terms of separating the personal from the professional) and scheduling my life. Admittedly the one item I put on the “to-do” list feature never saw completion, but I felt better just for knowing it was there!

Of course Plaxo was first and foremost a program for organising your contacts, the people you knew, and providing an infrastructure so that when they changed their details (assuming that user allowed it) you would automatically receive the new details in your contact details immediately.

Suddenly wherever you had access to the internet, you had the tools to organise your contacts, your calendar, your life.

Lately, however, I have become more than a tad enamored with Gmail from Google. It does pretty much everything Plaxo does (well, at least in conjunction with other aspects of the Google empire), but also incorporates email access. Not only do you get your own @gmail.com email address, but you also have the options of importing (and sending) from other POP email accounts. In effect, not only are you able to manage your contacts (and divide them into personal/professional), but you can do much the same thing with your email.

Imagine being on holidays in the South of France (or, indeed, anywhere!), logging into your Gmail account, checking your emails, your calendar. And within one window, sending an email to your nephew who has having a birthday from a personal account, and sending your boss an update from your business email account.

Admittedly you can do most of these things with Outlook and the Plaxo add-on, but the benefit of Gmail is that you can go anywhere and all you need is a browser and internet access. No special email client is required, no add-ons to download.

Interestingly Plaxo can now synchronize with Google accounts. (Plaxo also incorporates a strange and relatively new RSS feature, which seems more aimed at “sharing” feeds with your contacts than compiling them for your own reference, although they do have private options if you are so inclined.) Perhaps even more interestingly, the “synchronization” only works in one direction. You can update information from your Google Calendar to your Plaxo one, but not the other way around. Perhaps further reason to use Gmail as your primary source of information and Plaxo as a backup?

Plaxo is very candid about the limitations you will experience in the throes of synchronization with Google. Certainly things to be mindful of, especially if you elect to use a combination of the two services.

While both services are perfectly respectable, I do intend to place greater emphasis in the immediate future on Gmail and Google Calendar. If you use either of these services and have any comments or suggestions, please leave a comment below.

Categories: My eLife
Tags: