Homes are morphing into offices. Since when was your address book a real book? Do you still have greeting cards ready for celebrations and commiserations? The head of the household is now home office manager.
Our address books are on the Web, on our computers, on our phones and on paper. With social networking sites proliferating, my true friends’ contact information still belongs in my address book. Maintaining address books can be a chore: Do you need that street address any longer?
Plaxo (www.plaxo.com), a Mountain View company, says it has 16 million people using its address book services. You either love it — for its convenience and free services — or hate it, because it sends e-mails whenever your contacts move or have a birthday coming up.
John McCrea, vice president of marketing, describes how at his recruitment interview he asked engineering VP Rikk Carey how Plaxo had changed his life. Carey said it had improved his karma. How can a mundane address book improve karma?
First, my karma improves when friends, instead of me, update my address book — a boon for the home office manager. Second, as McCrea recalled Carey telling him, sending a birthday card effortlessly improves business and personal relationships. And third, Plaxo’s paid service removes duplicates from your address book. This last feature is particularly useful if you find Micosoft’s Active Sync, which manages contacts between MS Outlook and your phone or PDA, creating duplicates when there are very slight differences in an address record.
Finally, when I update my contact information, more than a few contacts will keep in touch by replying to Plaxo’s e-mail. As someone who once had 14 addresses in 15 years, sending out change of address notices is just one of the many jobs that Plaxo’s service simplifies. There are many more smart applications yet to be created when you have an accurate underlying address book.
Online greeting cards is an area that Plaxo is charging for. Why pay for them when you could just take a picture and send it in an e-mail? Well, if you want to convey style, you might consider paying. I found a cute penguin, for example, in the Plaxo-collection, which was not unlike a Linux logo — ideal for a geek.
Although I could have had a happy-footed penguin on Hallmark’s eCard site for free, I preferred the ad-free Plaxo site — and I doubt, without a reminder from Plaxo, I’d have remembered to send a card at all. (Incidentally, if you want to make your own virtual or cuddly penguin www.free-penguin.org is the site for you.)
Plaxo has plenty of room for growth with 16 million users. It is supported on both PCs and Macs, as well as on mobile phones and Mozilla’s Thunderbird address book, a companion to the Firefox browser. All without spam or spyware. Plaxo is partnering with major Web address books, and currently has a relationship with AOL, as well as support for gmail, MSN Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail. It plans to open up more interfaces for developers.
Currently located near Shoreline, Plaxo plans to move its 50 local employees to another part of Mountain View. They have stellar investors — Sequoia Capital, for example — with Mike Moritz taking an active role on the board, and Tim Koogle, former Yahoo! CEO, as another investor. As the company expands towards profitability, it is worth taking a fresh look at it — as user, developer or partner.
Angela Hey can be reached at amhey@techviser.com.
