The all-new Plaxo has been in public beta less than 24 hours, and the reponse has been amazing. Even overwhelming. (Sorry to those who have experienced some seriously slow performance, particularly in the morning surge of traffic. We just added a bunch of API servers, so performance should be better now. And to those who may have encountered a sync bug, sorry, too. Feel free to ping me at john at plaxo.com.)
The unveiling of Plaxo 3.0 began last evening at 9:00 Pacific (midnight on the East Coast). The first (and some of the most in-depth) early coverage came from the blogosphere -- specifically from Robert Scoble, who had come to visit us last week to record some video interviews. Scobleizer deserves credit for really breaking the story.
A wide variety of prominent media outlets added their voices to the chorus, including the Wall Street Journal, the San Jose Mercury News, Reuters, GigaOm, TechCrunch, Mashable, Stowe Boyd, ZD Net, InformationWeek, ComputerWorld, Web Worker Daily, Wired, the Register, and more.
It's been great to see the reaction after all the months of hard work. But we also know there's a lot of work ahead of us. Bugs to fix. Critical features to add. Continued investment in performance and scaling. Oh yes, and we know, everybody wants us to get Gmail Contacts syncing! (We're working on it with folks at Google. Stay tuned.)
Good work Plaxo - this is a significant improvement over the previous version. The improved user interface, integrated calendar and additional sync points should encourage more and more people to join.
The ability to sync with Facebook and UK mobile phones would make Plaxo even more useful!
Chris