The Quest for PIM 2.0: Plaxo 3.0

Online PIM purveyors Plaxo used to have a pretty bad reputation for spamming people from your uploaded address book and pressuring them to join the service. I’m happy to report that this is no longer the case, as I’ve been testing Plaxo for a few weeks now and have yet to receive a single complaint about it from any of my five hundred-plus contacts. With their new “3.0″ service I can’t quite say that Plaxo meets the gold standard for “everything available on every device”, but it does look like they are the best of what’s out there if you’re not an ideal candidate for Microsoft Exchange.

For a quick overview of the service I’ll refer you to this online demo:

One big plus for Plaxo on the Mac is that I can use it to sync my Apple Address book and local copy of Thunderbird. You wouldn’t think this would be such a big deal but the two apps use completely different file formats, yet somehow Plaxo is able to seemlessly read and write between them.

Another benefit of using Plaxo comes from their partnership with LinkedIn (aka Facebook for business-types). If you’re on Facebook then you’ll already know that its value correlates directly to how many of your friends are there. It’s the same deal with Plaxo and LinkedIn — whenever my colleagues there update their contact info the changes propagate through Plaxo to the Address Book on my Mac, and I know enough folks who are listed on one or the other to make it worthwhile.

Where Plaxo stumbles is with its lack of support for iCal tasks. It might actually be due to Nokia’s own SyncML implementation; I know from previous PIM 2.0 tests that my events and to-dos are lumped together in the same database on my phone… But if Apple’s calendaring app can read them, surely Plaxo can too?

Oh, and about Plaxo Pulse… It’s this new whiz-bang feature where you can dump all your RSS feeds onto one page for all your friends to follow, but there are lots of other sites jumping on the same bandwagon. More on that in another post…

Bermuda Film Fest Goes Web 2.0!

The times, they are definitely a-changing…

In years past my annual pilgrimage to the Bermuda Film Festival would be preceded by a many tedious hours spent on their website, cutting and pasting screening times and locations into a spreadsheet, reorganizing them chronologically and only then coming up with a suitable viewing schedule.

But now, thanks to a partnership with US and A-based film distributors/festival promoters B-Side, I have my very own user account for BIFF 2008, complete with calendars, space for reviews, even the ability to dump entries from this very blog for all Bermudians to see — though for some reason the imported content is not click-able. For shame!

About the only I can’t do with BIFF 2.0 is, you know, actually purchase movie tickets, but that feature should go live mid-week when seats are offered up to the general public. I hope.

Does Anybody Even Make Desktop Apps Anymore?

So I’m reading intomobile’s coverage of a new service called Dashwire, which lets you manage your mobile phone’s contacts, photos, texts, web bookmarks and more from a single, handy web page. As an unabashed power user who regularly shuttles files and info back and forth from MacBook to Nokia someone like me would be the perfect candidate for something like this, were it not for one thing:

There is no way in hell I’m going to blindly turn over my precious info to a bunch of strangers, especially if it’s for free!

In my hiptop days I could justify having the same data stored on Danger’s remote servers because I was paying $20/month for the privilege of so doing — I could at least hope that some of that money was going towards keeping my data safe. But you have to wonder about Dashwire’s business plan, as the screenshots on their site are so cram-packed with info from your handset that there isn’t any apparent room for advertising. In fact, the only thing they ask for in return for their service is your mobile phone number, which we all know from my last post is something you should guard with your very life!

And then there’s mint, the award-winning Web 2.0 startup that offers “refreshing money management”. You just hand over your bank account and credit card info and they’ll give you free pie charts and spending graphs in return.

Uh-huh.

Either of these would make for a fine “traditional” application on a desktop computer — hey, I’d pay money for both if the price was right. But to take your sensitive data and stash it god-knows-where on the web behind a tarted-up facade of AJAX geegaws? I smell a scam.

Of course, I still don’t trust Gmail…