Managing Contacts with the p2p Plaxo in Outlook Address Book

So you have a whole del­uge of con­tacts in your email software's address book. Now you real­ize you've ended up with a bunch of old email addresses, dupli­cate addresses, etc. Here's a cool util­ity devel­oped by the same team that brought you Nap­ster, and it's called Plaxo

So you have a bunch of con­tacts in your email soft­ware. You also have the set­ting "Auto-add every­one I reply to, to my address book" enabled. Now you real­ize you've ended up with a bunch of old email addresses, dupli­cate addresses, etc. Here's a cool peer-to-peer (p2p) util­ity devel­oped by the same team that brought you Napster…and it's called Plaxo.

Note: If you have signed up for Plaxo and want to sign off, here is one clever way to opt out from Jeremy Wagstaff.

A friend from Hong Kong alerted me to Plaxo, and I thought what a spam-inducing piece of bab­ble. Turns out it is a really nifty util­ity to man­age your con­tacts, the UI is really sim­ple to use, and a cou­ple of emails here and there later, you will have all your con­tacts auto-recognized and input into Plaxo.

When a con­tact replies, any new details they've sent are auto­mat­i­cally added to your Out­look. If any of these peo­ple then down­load and install Plaxo, any future changes to your con­tact details or theirs are updated auto­mat­i­cally. In other words, Plaxo is a peer-to-peer (p2p) net­work, just like Nap­ster was, or Kazaa is.

Obvi­ously, you need to be online in order for any updates to be made.

It is a plu­gin, so it shows up as a menu in Outlook:

Once there, it is pretty easy to update your own con­tacts, to inform your con­tacts about Plaxo, and to keep it all auto­mat­i­cally updated:

You can send your own updated con­tact infor­ma­tion to selected peo­ple in your address book — but you may want not to send Plaxo requests to *every­one* in your address book, Plaxo really should not make that the default option.

Over­all ver­dict: this is really cool stuff if used sen­si­bly! Cur­rently works only with MS Out­look and Out­look Express, but plans are afoot to make it com­pat­i­ble with other mail clients, includ­ing Lotus Notes, Mozilla (Netscape) and Eudora. When that com­pat­i­bil­ity fol­lows, what a cool tool this will be!

More info:

• Prod­uct Features
• How it works (Dum­mies Explanation)