Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

Plaxo is one of the coolest companies on the planet.

Really!

I admit that I didn’t always feel about Plaxo this way. Once, Plaxo was a textbook example of how NOT to handle users. I remember a time when I received several ‘friendly reminders’ a week from unsuspecting Plaxo members. They simply changed one character and without any warning the Plaxo server sent out hundreds of messages to everybody in their addressbook.

But a few months ago Plaxo CEO Ben Golub publicly apologized to, well, everyone! He did this on the Plaxo Blog and promised to radically change their wicked ways. In short:

No More Spam!

And it worked. The change of strategy and apology post were in March 2006 when they had 10 million users. By september 2006 (in only six months) they grew to 15 million users. I wonder how many users they have today.

The Future of Social Networking

The fact that they have a lot of users and are working hard to fix their bad image is not the reason they are cool. The reason they are cool is that they are an example of a really useful Social Networking site. I like LinkedIn too and use it as a kind of CV builder but Plaxo is a lot more useful. What it does, in case you don’t know, is keep a record of everyone in one database. Instead of copying each address several times Plaxo just keeps links to each record. This means that if one day I decide to change my emailaddress I only do this in one place, my record, and everybody has my correct data right away. After all, they only link to my addressbook data. In the end, the whole world will have just one addressbook record in one database and links to everybody elses, always up-to-date addressbookrecords too.

Imagine never having to send a address change to anyone and never losing someones number or having an old address anymore.

The Future of the Web

This idea of dynamic information in a central database, always up-to-date could work for other systems too. Some widgets do this for blogs. You don’t copy/paste a Google Ad to your blog. You just ad a code and the Google Ad is hosted centrally, at the Google server. Logical.

The same could apply to any data on your site. If you plan to sell something on eBay you should be able to write down that information in one place, then have it indexed by several services who recognize that it was tagged as a ‘Item for sale’ datachunk and display it accordingly.

Which is exactely how the Semantic Web is supposed to work.

Plaxo is the Semantic Web?

Not really.

Really not!

But it is a fine example of how computers can be used to make things easier and more secure, productive and efficient. You would suppose that computers are secure, productive and efficient already. But how many times have you typed in your name today? When was your last back-up? What if you lose your PC right now? How much data would you lose? How much time do you spend on updating data? Does your website still say ‘Copyright 2006′? Shouldn’t a PC warn you that your own website (doesn’t it know that you own a website?) should be updated?

Plaxo won’t be the answer to all of this but I find it very inspiring and will try to adopt the Plaxo philosophy in my own products as much as I can. And no, I don’t mean the spamming thing…

Using Plaxo on your own website

If you haven’t used Plaxo before I suggest you give it a try. Its easy and you will love the idea of always having everyones information up-to-date.

If you are a webmaster I suggest you check out the brilliant Address Book Access widget. You can install it on your site in minutes (We will add it to Fleck.com in a few days) and it will allow your users to access their Plaxo, GMail, Hotmail and several other Addressbooks with one or two clicks. That means they don’t have to manually re-enter each contact they want to email through your website. The feature is still in beta but I sure hope that every site on the web will implement this soon.

Conclusion

Plaxo is something you should check out. Even if you did in the past and were put off by their spamming practices. I don’t have any reason to persuade the whole world to use it too except that it would make MY own addressbook more up-to-date too.

Plaxo is a privately held company. It started in 2001 and is funded by Sequoia Capital, Globespan Capital Platforms, Harbinger Venture Management, DAG Ventures, and Cisco Systems and by individual investors Ram Shriram and Tim Koogle.

Unfortunately I don’t own any shares in Plaxo…

UPDATE: Ben Golub, the CEO of Plaxo, is not shy about publishing his contact details and even has a message in his Plaxo account:

“Is Plaxo working well for you? Please let me know if you have any suggestions, complaints, comments, etc.”

I decided to send him some suggestions and a link to this blog. Within a few hours I received a friendly message from Ben Golub:

“First and foremost, thank you for the great blog post. I appreciate your comments. I was happy to pass your note around to the other 46 employees of Plaxo!”

You just gotta love a CEO of a company with 15 million users who answers his email personally…

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