Great to see a positive response to our new LinkedIn Sync feature. Two posts I particularly enjoyed...

One from Ian Schafer:

"When two companies get together to mash their services up...all because consumers spoke up and said it would make their lives more organized, it’s a thing of beauty. LinkedIn and Plaxo have joined forces to allow Plaxo Members to sync their LinkedIn contacts with their Plaxo address book, effectively mashing their flagship products. I’ve synced my two accounts, and it worked splendidly. I feel more organized and connected already."

And one on Mashable:

"Using the LinkedIn sync feature, the Plaxo and LinkedIn communities can now be joined. The feature has been requested by several Plaxo members, wanting the ability to sync their LinkedIn contacts as they do with their Google, Yahoo and Outlook accounts, among others."

I also heard directly from quite a few users. Please keep your suggestions and feedback coming. And, yes, I heard you; it's clear that there is strong interest in our upcoming Google sync!

Ever since I joined Plaxo, there’s one feature that I’ve been asked for more than any other – a way to bridge between the two separate, but complementary worlds of Plaxo and LinkedIn. The requests have come from conversations with friends, from surveys of our members, and from posts and comments in the blogosphere, such as:

“LinkedIn and Plaxo should work together so that LinkedIn contacts are automatically sync’d to Plaxo, and then end-users could make use of Plaxo’s sync’ing services to synchronize contacts with desktop applications.”
(Full post here.)

We recently surveyed our members about what other services they use and which ones they’d like us to sync with. (Sync plays a central role in the upcoming Plaxo 3.0.) The response for LinkedIn was very clear. Over 20 percent of respondents indicated they were users of both services, and most of them said that they really wanted to be able to sync their LinkedIn contacts over to their Plaxo address book. It was also clear that this feature would be a natural fit for our Premium service bundle.

So, leveraging our soon-to-be released Plaxo 3.0 sync architecture, Joseph built LinkedIn Sync, and we made it a part of an all-new Plaxo Premium, which we are launching this week. If you’re already a Premium member, this is one of two* new features you can start using right away. If you’re not yet a Premium member, you can try it free for 30 days. Either way, the place to access it from is from the Toolbox on Plaxo Online (screenshot below):

I confess that LinkedIn Sync was also a feature that I pushed for (in part) because I really wanted it for myself. So, I could hardly wait to try it out. Here’s a screenshot from when I ran it. As you can see, it brought over all 118 of my Connections on LinkedIn, with 95 of those being new to my address book, and 23 of them already there (and correctly merged). Alternatively, I could have chosen to just have them all go into a separate folder.

Oh, yes. And I should probably point out that moments after these contacts showed up in my Plaxo online address book, they were also available in my Outlook e-mail client -- and in my Yahoo! Mail account and my Gmail account! (See the "sync points" visible at the bottom of the screenshot.)

LinkedIn Sync is currently configured to be manually triggered, but an upcoming release will offer an automated option, as we put the finishing touches on our 3.0 sync backend. Of course, one can easily imagine all sorts of things that could be done to strengthen the integration between Plaxo and LinkedIn – or bridges that could be built to other business or social networking services.

What else would you like to see, in terms of LinkedIn and Plaxo? What other services would you like to see Plaxo sync with? Please let us know, either by posting a comment here or by sending me an e-mail directly to: john at plaxo dot com.

Okay, that’s all for now, but there’s a lot more on the way soon.

John

*The other new feature is an enhanced de-duper that Huy and Joseph built. Now it de-dupes address book and calendar.

Congrats to Mozilla for releasing version 2.0 of their Thunderbird e-mail client! Throughout the beta period we've been receiving queries from our users on when we'd be supporting this new version. Well one of our engineers got this up and running pretty quick, so now we're pleased to present the new version of the add-on with support for Tbird 2.0.

The new Thunderbird add-on is now available at http://www.plaxo.com/downloads, so check it out, and let us know what you think!

-Bryan

Although we’re all really busy working on the new Plaxo 3.0 we still make sure to schedule time for our beloved Haxos. During this past Haxo, Garret fixed up a new mobile version of Plaxo he’d been working on and it’s now ready for users to try. It’s built as a WAP 2.0 app and was very quick to develop using our new Plaxo 3.0 APIs and PHP. In the current version you can access all your data (calendar, contacts, tasks, and notes), see the current weather, and search for contacts. You can even add tasks and notes (events & contacts coming soon!) so you can jot things down when away from your computer.

Since this isn’t an official product, you may find bugs or areas that need improvement. It’s even possible that it won’t work at all on your phone (especially if it’s an older model). Good or bad, please let us know how it works for you by posting in the new Plaxo Mobile Google Group or sending us an e-mail at labs-mobile@plaxo.com.

Happy WAPping!

-- Mark Jen
Product Line Manager