Angelo DiNardi

Plaxo: once a nice, simple, useful service gone the way of craptastic social networking. Maybe I’m not like most people but I don’t need EVERY SINGLE ONE of my web services to be a social network. I don’t want connections and invitations and sharing. I got plaxo to solve a need: having my contacts when I’m away from my main machine via the web. Secondary was as a backup if something happened to that machine. It worked and did the job well.

They had a method of syncing your contact with the person’s actual contact info if they had the service. Ok. That’s reasonably useful. And it was on the sidelines. Storage of contacts was still first and foremost. Then they started adding things like calendaring and connections. A mini-feed kinda thing that’s just as useless as facebook’s. And on and on. Pretty soon the contacts storage was on the sideline and the rest of their social features were in front. When I got a connection request from someone I knew that was it — I didn’t like the service anymore. I haven’t really used it in months because it was more annoying every time I logged in.

So since I just got MobileMe and everything seems to be working better (not perfect yet — but generally usable) and I have the iPhone with my contacts synced to MobileMe and my computer I decided to rid myself of Plaxo. MobileMe’s address book app is just like using the OS X address book, simple and useful. It stores contacts — nothing more, nothing less. It does it’s job just fine.

Thanks for trying, Plaxo. Like everything else you had a good service then screwed it up with social crap. I may build and use web apps for pretty much everything if I can, but I never caught on to the social thing. I want simple, useful services and that seems to be the thing slowly becoming more rare on the web. Of course, that’s probably a big reason I love Apple products. They do what they’re supposed to do well, and not much more. And that’s fine with me. If it fits my need I’ll use it and if not I’ll find something else that does. 

So in an interesting turn of events I bought an iPhone 3G on Friday. Got in line at the Stanford Mall Apple Store at 6:15am. I was out the door of the Apple Store with a new iPhone at about 9:30am. I was around the 40th person in line, give or take a few. I’d say it was a pretty good morning (Yeah they couldn’t activate me in store and it took me a while once I got back with it… ).

I was also interesting in MobileMe (because I like synchronization and push) so I bought it with the iPhone for about 30% off. Although it’s been through some rough times.. and still isn’t *perfect* yet.. it definitely works when it does. I’m sure it’ll improve once things settle down and Apple fixes whatever issues are plaguing it.

So this leads me to LifeSync. The point was to sync my Google Calendar to iCal. Well now I don’t need to. I’m using MobileMe as both online calendar application and the sync tool between my Mac and iPhone. Although I don’t need it myself anymore I’ll definitely try my best to make sure it keeps functioning for those that will continue to use it.

Back to playing with iPhone applications.