Plaxo, the online contacts manager that had an irritating habit of getting in touch with users and non-users far too often, has come out with a new version that you shouldn’t mind hearing about from them.

Plaxo members’ practice of email blitzes requesting contacts to update their information became akin to spam for many people and garnered the Mountain View company bad publicity.

“We had some over-zealous users who probably sent too many of those emails and I think it annoyed a lot of people,” Todd Masonis, Plaxo co-founder, told me.

“So about a year ago, we announced a change of direction, reduced the viral marketing to a trickle and we have been quietly building a whole new product, it’s really a new beginning for the company.”

That product, Plaxo 3.0, came out of private beta today and contains some neat Web 2.0 and social networking add-ins, improved syncing of contacts and a new calendar application.

The new Plaxo did a great job of syncing and consolidating my contacts from my Yahoo address book, Outlook and LinkedIn, the latter sync being part of the $50 a year premium service.

The integrated calendar has attractive features including the ability to create countdowns to significant events and to decorate it with a background and side panel from your personal Flickr photo feed. However, I found it buggy in syncing with Google Calendar, with a number of events failing to be imported.

Contact information also now benefits from maps and click-to-call phone numbers courtesy of mash-ups with Yahoo and Jajah.

The feature I found most impressive was the Pulse tab ( click on screenshot below), which can scrape contact information of friends to automatically alert you to the latest posts on the blogs they listed, as well as showing their new Flickr uploads, changes to their Amazon wish lists or their jobs.

This looks like the newsfeed on friend’s activities on Facebook, but seems a far more useful tool and is based on open APIs with the promise of further plug-ins to come.

"I think we’ve found our pathway over to social networking," said Todd Masonis.

I think revamped Plaxo will get a much friendlier reception from this new crowd.

UPDATE Robert Scoble and others are also having problems with Plaxo’s sync feature.

June 25th, 2007 in Internet | Permalink