Plaxo Wants to Sync Your Digital Life

Aiming to become 'the Switzerland of personal information,' Plaxo has debuted the newest version of its syncing application. It allows a user to federate their information across a variety of services, although not everybody's having a good experience.

For example, a user could ensure their Apple Mail address book is the same as what is on their Windows-based Microsoft Outlook contacts list, and so forth. The same can be done for calendar information as well.

Previously, the application could only ensure that contact information was up-to-date in a single application between two users. The new Plaxo would ensure that information is available across almost any service the consumer uses.

Plaxo says this is the first application to do so, and has spent the past year developing the technology behind the product. It also signals an attempt by the company to keep itself relevant in the marketplace.

"Plaxo 3.0 is the platform upon which we can build out our 'sync and share' vision, giving people access to all their data wherever they need it, and enabling ever richer ways to stay connected with the people who matter in their lives," Plaxo founder Todd Masonis said.

Information can be transferred between Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, AOL, Mac OS X, Thunderbird, and mobile phone clients. Software is available in seven languages and on both Mac OS X and Windows.

There are still issues to be ironed out however, as some analysts reported problems, there was even one case of corrupted adress book data. "Sync is a critical problem to solve but I haven't had this bad an experience since ActiveSync version 1.0," JupiterResearch senior analyst Michael Gartenberg said after restoring his address books on his Mac and PC.

Blogger Robert Scoble also had problems. "In my tests today it was way too slow. It's not synching reliably with my Outlook 2007 running on Parallels on the Mac," he reported. "Had to drop back to XP and Office 2003 to get it to work right."

It should be noted, however, that the application is still in beta.