Just in time for MacWorld, we’re excited to rollout a new version of our Mac client, which brings Pulse to the Mac Address Book! This follows our recent rollout of our integration between Pulse and Microsoft Outlook.

Why do we keep adding integrations points for Pulse into other tools and services?

Because with Pulse, we’re focused on building a really useful social application that helps people stay connected, share stuff, and communicate with their family, friends, and business network. And since most of our members are busy professionals, it’s not enough to enable communication just within the Pulse website; we need to bring Pulse – and the unified address book underlying it – to the communication tools, services, and devices that they use.

The latest version of Plaxo for Mac is a little piece of software you download that does a whole lot of stuff. As always, it acts as a bridge between the Mac’s sync services and your Plaxo account, performing address book and calendar sync as an automated background process. And through the magic of Plaxo’s multi-way sync capability, you then have a single “smart address book” you can use across the disparate worlds of Mac, Outlook, the web, and more.

In addition, there’s some nicely integrated UI that we add to your Mac Address Book, a special details view for each contact. And it’s that UI that we’ve brought to life with Pulse:

- See what the person is sharing on a large and growing list of sites, including blogs, Digg, Twitter, del.icio.us, Flickr, Yelp, and dozens of others
- See other content that they’re sharing just in Pulse
- Click over to see they’re profile and full content stream

(Of course, you only see what that person wants you to see, based on Pulse’s explicit connection and sharing model.)

Plaxo for Mac also mashes up with Mac Mail, adding Click to Connect UI that give you one-click access to maps, directions, and VOIP calls.

If you’re already using Pulse, download the new Mac client here:
http://www.plaxo.com/downloads/mac

If you're not yet a member, get your account set up first.
http://www.plaxo.com/signup

We’re big believers in turbo-charging apps by connecting them to the “social graph,” so expect more down this pathway in the near future.

John McCrea
VP of Marketing

With the recent release of Office 2007 and Windows Vista from Microsoft, some of our users have been wondering - how can I get a version of the Plaxo Outlook/OE toolbar that supports these platforms?

Well, we are pleased to announce the availability of a beta version of our newest version of the Outlook/OE toolbar which now supports the newest Office and Windows.

If you would like to try out this version, you can download it from http://down.plaxo.com/down/release-2.13.0.8/PlaxoInstallNT.exe. Note that this is still a BETA version and we have not yet completed testing. We would also like to ask that only users of Outlook 2007 try this version at this time.

For feedback or support on this version, please e-mail support here at Plaxo. Thanks!

At my parent's home, you can always find a stack of calling cards next to the phone in the kitchen. It's the cheapest way for them to keep in touch with their family in Vietnam. But calling cards have always been such a hassle. Minutes run out, some cards don't work, and the rates really aren't all that cheap. My mom was paying about $0.27/minute to call her niece in Vietnam with a calling card. Over the weekend, though, my sister and I got my mom to try her first international call via Plaxo Click to Call. She converted solely on the cost. At $0.16/min., she talked to her niece for longer and with no interruptions from minutes running out on her calling card. And she did it all from the convenience of her landline phone.

You, dear reader, can also find the Plaxo Click to Call button in your address book. It's the easiest way to make inexpensive phone calls. By easy, I mean no headsets, no downloads, and no microphones. Just Plaxo, you, and your phone. And by inexpensive, I mean less than $0.0212/min to China, $0.0196/min to Germany, and only $.001/min in the US. You can check out the rest of the rates here. By partnering with Jajah, our members get the additional benefit of not having to remember or type in any phone numbers, and they always know the number they're calling is up-to-date with Plaxo's smart address book.

Here's how you can initiate a call:

Jajah in Outlook	Jajah in Plaxo Online

1. Go to your Plaxo Online address book or get the latest Plaxo plug-in for Outlook to make calls from your Outlook address book. (Plans are in the works to integrate with Outlook Express and our other clients too.)
2. Decide who you want to call. Click on the purple button. (See picture above).
3. Plaxo transfers the numbers to Jajah's website.
4. Hit the green "Place Call" button on Jajah's website.

THEN...


5. Your phone rings.


6. Your contact's phone rings.


7. And you can start chatting.

Mom doesn't always "get" what I do at Plaxo, but now she sort of gets it and she likes it. Now, when she can't get in touch with me on the weekends, she can call Vietnam :)

-- Janice (Hi, Mom!) Ta, Product Manager

Plaxo for Mac 1.0 is ready for prime time and is now available for download. We've been busy improving performance, filling out our feature set and fixing some of bugs. Here's a partial list of what's new in 1.0:

• New contact card actions - Quickly send e-cards and get maps and directions for your contacts.


• Better contact history display - Now you can easily see the old and new values each time information in your contacts changes.


• Cooler animations and nicer graphics all around - who doens't like a good lookin' app? :)

Also, we were in the middle of building Entourage sync when Microsoft went ahead and did it for us. With the latest update of Entourage 2004 you can sync your Entourage Address Book with your OS X Address Book which effectively closes the loop. We've added an FAQ with detailed instructions on how to get things set up and running.

As always, please let us know if you run into any problems or have suggestions; we're listening and want to know what you'd like to see. Thanks!

-- Mark Jen, Product Manager

UPDATE: Plaxo for Mac 1.0 has been officially released.

The Plaxo for Mac team is very happy to announce that we've posted what is intended to be the full release of Plaxo for Mac 1.0. This is our release candidate so we don't anticipate any problems; if you're a Mac user that likes getting early access to software, please go ahead and give it a spin.

You can grab the release candidate (1.0 Preview) at:

http://down.plaxo.com/down/mac/beta/

Let us know if you run into any significant problems - our belief and hope is that you'll have a good experience with this release, but we would be remiss if we didn't ask!

If all goes well, this version will be posted to our main Plaxo for Mac download page at the end of this week (and will also be made available to the Auto Update feature in Plaxo for Mac).

Thanks!
Plaxo for Mac Team

If you've been following some of the postings here on this Blog as well as elsewhere on the blogosphere, you know there's been much discussion regarding 'acquaintance spam' and abusive use of the Plaxo service. Much of this abuse can be traced to the once-prominent Update Contact Wizard (UCW) feature. The UCW allows members to select individuals from their address book and send them an email asking for updated contact information.

Todd Masonis already wrote about some of the steps we are taking to prevent potential abuse. All of these changes are now in place. I believe the most significant change is the removal of the UCW from the new registration flow. Previously, when someone would join Plaxo, a new user was encouraged to update their address book by running the UCW. As a result, new users accounted for the vast majority of update request emails sent. Today, the UCW has been removed from the new user registration flow. New or existing users are no longer encouraged to run the UCW and the UCW button has been removed from the Plaxo Toolbar. Furthermore, newer Plaxo clients such as Thunderbird, Mac, and AIM do not include the UCW.

For members who may continue to run the UCW, perhaps because they have an older Plaxo Outlook client or they launch the UCW manually, we have also added additional service controls which limit the number of update requests a member can send. Additional throttling controls are also in the works, and we are actively moving away from using update request emails entirely. We hope and believe these changes will make a big difference, but we intend to remain vigilant in our efforts to eliminate any abusive use of the service. To that end, we would appreciate your help in the effort by reporting to us any inappropriate or suspicious use of the Plaxo service.

Reporting Abuse:

If you feel your privacy has been violated or that a member is abusing the Plaxo system, we ask for your assistance in reporting the abuse to our Plaxo Abuse Department (abuse @plaxo.com). We take every report of abuse very seriously, and each report is investigated and followed up on.

We've just released a new version of the Plaxo Toolbar for Outlook and Outlook Express, version 2.8. There's nothing really dramatic in here, mostly minor fixes and such.

Do those images look better? We're using a better image scaling technique, so the photos on the Click-To-Connect buttons and elsewhere should look nicer now.

Anti-Spam As part of our effort to cut down on unwanted e-mails, the Update Contacts button has been removed from the toolbar, though still available through the menu, and all the recipients are UNchecked by default.

Bugs We also fixed some minor bugs, mostly related to the new Click-To-Connect button.

To download this version of our Outlook Toolbar, visit our downloads page.

Today we released a new beta of Plaxo for the Mac ("Maxo", as we affectionately call it here). Woohoo! And, of course we're all very excited about releasing a new product and finishing something that we've been working on for three friggin' years. There's a deeper meaning to this release, but I will get to that later...

Maxo team: Dru Nelson, Drew Colace, Jie Chen, Wendy Johnson (w/ Rosco), Mark Jen, Christian Bohland

Why did it take so damn long?

Plaxo has been around for four years (yikes!), and at our core, we've always felt that rather than inventing yet-another-address-book (or calendar), we wanted to bring Plaxo features to your existing address book. So, as a small startup in 2002, it made sense to start with Outlook and Outlook Express, since it clearly had the largest user base. And, like many young startups in their honeymoon phase, we had grand plans to quickly integrate with lots of other platforms, such as Mac, Act!, Lotus, Y!, Hotmail, and so on. This same question—"when do we do the Mac port?"—has happened at practically every job I've had (and in most cases, it never happened).

Well, as you can imagine, 2002 faded into 2003, and 2003 faded into 2004, and so on, and we still were putting huge effort into Outlook and Outlook Express. To be really honest, we didn't realize what we had bitten off when we started down the Outlook path—the stuff we've done to make Outlook and Outlook Express support Plaxo is a combination of creative engineering and voodoo incantations—but the good news is that we've finally figured it out and now have time to integrate with other platforms (no more dead chickens!).

Outlook Voodoo priest

[btw: Believe it or not, we started our very first Mac project back in 2002. We asked a few of our Mac friends to work in parallel with our Windows team and to try to stay up-to-date (source-wise). Unfortunately, this was a classic case of starting too early. The architecture was changing so rapidly that the Mac team was constantly out of date and eventually fell too far behind. The good news is that we finally got our APIs down and now have a base to start lots of new integration projects from.]

So, about a year ago we met Drew Colace. He impressed us with his Mac dev knowledge and captivating personality, and after changing our minds another ten times, we hired Drew to get us back on the Mac train. Drew jumped in with both hands typing and launched our first beta of Mac Plaxo in November 2005. Today's release is a major revision and was motivated by a lot of great feedback that we received from the first beta (thanks to everyone that helped!).

Why not do the Mac?

There are many great reasons for a developer or product manager to choose not to do the Mac version. In our case, there are definitely larger online address book user bases out there (e.g. Yahoo! and Hotmail) and Mac OSX is a completely unfamiliar operating system and development environment (and therefore expensive, risky, and complicated). And, a new platform introduces all kinds of new quality assurance and customer support issues. The list goes on, so I'm sure you get the idea. Inevitably it comes down to "is it worth the effort?" This is a question that thousands of product managers and engineering teams ask themselves (and most say "no" for reasons similar to above).

Why do the Mac?

So, why did we do the Mac? In most cases, the answer is because someone inside the company is a Mac zealot and begs enough to eventually get a programmer to hack out a demo and if they are really, really lucky, it actually ships for a few weeks (but gets little support or nurturing). It's rarely done for the right reasons and thus eventually peters out. But in our case, no one was a Mac zealot—although, we now have several Mac lovers at Plaxo—and we had no programmers with Mac dev experience. So, two things influenced us: 1) a Mac version of Plaxo was clearly the most requested feature we received; 2) the Mac community is rabid about products and embrace new things (if done well) with passion and enthusiasm; and 3) we firmly believed that we are not an Outlook-only shop. So, we saw a great opportunity to grow a small segment of extremely active users and force us to develop APIs that encouraged integration with Plaxo across a broad set of platforms.

API is the key

So, the story-within-the-story is that Plaxo is developing a platform to enable widespread integration. And, we wanted to eat our own dog food before others used our API. So, Maxo was the perfect choice to test this out since it was so different from the development environments that we were used to. We figured that if the APIs worked for a Mac programmer, they will work for anyone. :-) And, the only reason that it took us so long to release Maxo was because it was the guinea pig for future API users. As you can guess, this slowed Drew and team down quite a bit, but they persevered and shipped Maxo.

UI Evolution

Integrating Plaxo into the Mac Address Book offered unique UI challenges to us since we were less familiar with the Mac user experience and we recognized the importance of a 100% Mac experience. Anything less and we expected to be ignored by the Mac community.

A few key things drove our user experience design: 1) 100% Mac, 2) integrate into the Mac Address Book, not compete with it, and 3) find the right visual balance between "fits in" and "stands out."

Our first revision looked like this. We created a separate Plaxo address book application that synced with the Mac Address Book. This immediately felt weird and forced the user to make a choice between the Mac Address Book and the Plaxo Address Book.

Screen shot of Maxo first alpha release

In our second revision (Beta 1), we tried to integrate the Plaxo features into the Mac Address Book. We added the Plaxo widget at the bottom of the contact entry, but found this to be problematic and often obscuring the contact details.

Screen shot of Maxo first beta release

And, our current Beta looks like this. We moved the Plaxo enhancements to the right side of the contact details and enabled users to expand and contract the panel. This appears to be the best choice, but we're still looking for feedback.

Screen shot of Maxo second beta release

You can download the latest version at: http://www.plaxo.com/downloads/mac/

See the press release at: http://www.plaxo.com/about/releases/release-20060314

--Rikk Carey, EVP Engineering & Operations

Woo-hoo! The Plaxo Toolbar for Internet Explorer version 1.0 has arrived and we've included some goodies in it for everyone:

1. AIM users: AIM users can now sign in with their AIM screen names and passwords.
2. People who are thoughtful, but lazy: Send eCards directly from the toolbar or while looking at a contact's details. "Thank you" and "Happy Birthday" cards are only a click away.
3. People who are bugged by bugs: While we were at it, we thought we'd fix some bugs too.

Upgrade or download your toolbar now. It's good stuff: http://www.plaxo.com/ietoolbar

Janice Ta, IE Toolbar Product Manager

We released a new version of the Plaxo Toolbar for Outlook and Outlook Express earlier this week. The latest version is 2.7 and it is available immediately for download from the Plaxo website. As always, existing Plaxo toolbar users can upgrade to the latest version by going to the Plaxo / Help / About Plaxo menu and clicking on the upgrade now link.

This client release comes right on the heels of our latest Plaxo server release and the introduction of the Plaxo Open Platform Program and Open API, so I can tell you that Engineering, QA, and Product Management have been extremely busy.

The Plaxo Toolbar v2.7 includes a number of bug fixes, but also adds some very exciting features worth mentioning. The most significant are the enhancements made to the Click-to-Connect button. The CTC is the integrated Plaxo button that appears in the upper right corner when reading an email message. The CTC adds a personal touch to emails by displaying the sender's Plaxo photo on the button of if they are in your address book. Members also find the CTC button a convenient way to add the sender to their address book if they are not already there.

With the v2.7 release, we've enhanced the look and feel of the CTC and added a few more options. The button still shows the Plaxo member's photo and current status if they are already in your address book. But now the CTC button will also show the sender's Plaxo Photo even if they are not in your address book as long as that Plaxo member has already given you access to their information.

Also new is clicking on the CTC button which drops down a at-glance view of the contact showing additional details such as title and phone number. How many times have you received an email from someone and wanted to quickly give the person a call? Now the information is just a click away.

We've also added my personal favorite, a "more info..." button. This button opens up the contact's entry within my address book. For me at least, I often wish to reference the notes field for a contact and the "more info..." button makes it much easier to get to this information.

You still can easily add the person to your address book or send them your updated contact details. You'll also find the options to send the person an eCard or get a map or directions to their location.

Note about maps: Due to limitations with Yahoo Maps, the map feature only works for addresses located in the USA, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and United Kingdom / England. If the contact includes the appropriate Country within their address information, Plaxo will be able to perform a proper look up via Yahoo Maps.

And now with Plaxo Toolbar for Outlook and Outlook Express v2.7 out the door, Engineering is already hard at work on the next release. We should have some very exciting announcements to make soon so stay tuned...

As you may have seen, Thunderbird 1.5 is now available for download, and we've got an updated Plaxo Toolbar for Thunderbird to go with it. In addition to supporting Thunderbird 1.5, this new version is faster, more stable, and contains various other bug fixes. If you're already running the toolbar in Thunderbird, you can just go into the extensions manager and click "Update" to get the new version. Otherwise you can download it from our site. Enjoy!

Thanks,
The Plaxo Team

In case you haven’t heard yet, the new Plaxo-enabled version of AIM (called “Triton”) has now been officially released to the public. Thanks to everyone that participated in the beta program. We encourage everyone to download Triton and let us know what you think!

The Triton release is a really big deal for Plaxo. It’s by far the largest and deepest partner-integration we’ve ever done, and it’s going to result in (among other things) a big increase in the number of Plaxo members. This is great news for everyone that uses Plaxo, because it means you’ll be able to automatically stay in touch with more and more of your friends and colleagues. To make it even easier, you can now get connected with fellow Plaxo members in your address book if you know their e-mail address or AIM Screen Name (previously you could only get connected by e-mail address). So there will be more people to connect with, more ways to get connected, and more places where your contact information follows you around and is always up-to-date.

Plaxo-enabling AIM is also a great step forward in our goal of giving users access to their data in whatever application they use. Just like our IE toolbar and Thunderbird toolbar, the new AIM provides another group of users with the ability to build and maintain a universal address book where they need it most, and it extends the reach and value of everyone that uses Plaxo as part of another app. And just like with all our toolbars, users of the new AIM also get web access to their contacts via Plaxo Online, so you can always look up someone’s info while you’re on the go.

Here are some of the features you’ll notice when you download Triton:

• Triton setup wizard. You can create work and home cards to share with your contacts (including our new, more powerful sharing options), build a universal address book by importing your existing contacts from Outlook, Outlook Express, Hotmail, and Yahoo!, and build your Buddy List by finding all your contacts that have an AIM Screen Name. If you’re already a Plaxo member, you can just attach Triton to your existing account, and it will sync your Plaxo address book with Triton.
• Build your Buddy List. This is a really useful feature, especially for people that maintain an address book outside of AIM. Plaxo will look at all the contacts in your address book that have Screen Names (either that you’ve entered or that you’ve received from fellow Plaxo members) and we’ll also look up all AIM members whose Screen Name is linked to an e-mail in your address book. You’ll be surprised how many people you know are on AIM but that you didn’t have in your Buddy List! You can then choose which of those contacts you want to add to your AIM Buddy List. If you’re an existing Plaxo member, you can still run the build Buddy List wizard by launching it from the Edit menu (after you’ve successfully synced your address book the first time).
• Integrated Triton UI. Once you get up and running with Triton, you’ll notice that in addition to your Buddy List, you also have an “Addresses” tab that reveals your Plaxo-enabled address book. Here you can look up extra contact info for your buddies and even choose what info you want to share with them. You’ll also notice the familiar Plaxo icons in the address list for contacts that are also using Plaxo or that you’ve sent an update request to. You can also edit your Plaxo cards from within Triton by going to Edit → Edit My Contact Info.
• AIM enhancements for Outlook. In addition to the new AIM itself, Triton comes with an optional update to the Plaxo Toolbar for Outlook and Outlook Express. In addition to keeping your Outlook and AIM address books in sync, the primary benefit you’ll notice is AIM presence inside Outlook. Click on the AIM status icon next to the From: in any e-mail you receive and you can IM the person, look up their contact info, and more.
• AIM enhancements for Plaxo Online. We’ve also added several AIM-friendly features to our online address book. First off, you can now sign in using your AIM Screen Name, as well as any of your e-mail addresses. Of course, you first have to add your Screen Name to your Plaxo cards (for Triton users, this should happen automatically).
• AIM Mail and AOL Mail. AIM Mail is the new free e-mail service available to all AIM users. When you link you Plaxo account to Triton you Plaxo address book is synced with your AIM Mail or AOL Mail address book. If you use Plaxo with Outlook, Outlook Express, or Thunderbird changes you make in those address books and synced with your AIM mail or AOL mail address book; one Universal Address Book!

We hope everyone will find the Plaxo integration in the new AIM to be useful and fun. As you'll see, Triton greatly expands the number of ways you can stay in contact with your friends and colleagues (im, email, voice, video, etc.) and Plaxo provides you with the contact info you need to take advantage of these new features.

As usual, send us feedback and stay tuned for more to come!

Thanks,
The Plaxo Team

Around every 6-12 months, the Plaxo software autoupgrades to the latest build of the Plaxo client. This is done to provide minor patch fixes, incorporate minor new features, and phase out older versions of the client software that are no longer supported (ie: 0.x)

The autoupgade is rolled out over time, so in the coming weeks, members may notice their Plaxo client prompting them to install the latest version. The upgrade should take about a minute to complete and does not require any further action on the member's part.

The latest version of the Plaxo client being autoupgraded to is version 2.4.x.x.

Members can also manually check if they are running the latest version of Plaxo. You can go to the Plaxo / Help / About Plaxo menu to see if you have the latest version. If you do not have the latest version, you will have the option to upgrade from there as well.

A user in our forum asked about Plaxo support for the Mac OS X (I'm assuming he was referring to Entourage, since Plaxo for Thunderbird (beta) is available for Mac OS, Windows, and Linux).

We receive numerous requests to support various email clients and services and it is our stated intention to support Plaxo across multiple platforms, applications and services. Support for clients and services such as Skype, Mac OS X, ACT!, Incredimail, Lotus Notes, Groupwise, Firefox, and gMail are a few of the ones people often ask about.

[UPDATE: add to the list Opera, Mac Mail, Gmail, Hotmail]

Unfortunately, it's difficult for us to answer questions about unavailable features or releases. With our good intention of underpromising and overdelivering, we've taken the policy of publicly discussing features and releases after they are available. I realize this probably is not very comforting for some of our members excited to see Plaxo expanded to their favorite application or service, but hopefully people understand.

I will say this: personally, one of the things I like most about working here is our willingness to listen and respond to feedback. We appreciate all of the feedback we receive and it really does help to shape the direction, features, and priorities of Plaxo.

Within just the last two years, member feedback has helped Plaxo to expand beyond support for just Outlook and Outlook Express. Plaxo is available as a toolbar for Internet Explorer and Thunderbird. Plaxo can sync address data with services such as Yahoo! and AOL, and people can access their Plaxo data through Web and Wireless.

And of course, there is more to come. As you might imagine, we are looking very closely at the list I mentioned above, and many others as well. I feel we have some very exciting things in the pipeline that we're happy to discuss... once they become available.

Has anyone checked out the new AIM presence that is available through Plaxo Online!!! AIM presence allows you to quickly determine your contact's current AIM status.

Using the email address of the contact maintained within your Plaxo Address Book, you can quickly see if your buddy is online, idle, mobile, etc... If you also have AIM installed, you can easily connect with them by clicking on the presence icon and sending them a quick instant message.

This was one of many new features announced as part of Plaxo's integration with the Universal Address Book for AIM and AOL users. AIM presence will soon be rolled into the Plaxo toolbar for Outlook and Outlook Express, but this feature is available now through Plaxo Online.

The presence icon honors the AIM Privacy settings of your AIM buddy. If your buddy allow others to look up their online AIM status, you'll be able to see it through Plaxo Online. If not, no status information is displayed.

It's safe, secure, and pretty cool.

To see if any of your contacts are online, log into your Plaxo Online account, go to Contacts, and click on the Names view (https://www.plaxo.com/contact_list?view=0).

'till next time.

Stacy Martin
Plaxo Privacy Officer
privacy @t plaxo.com

CORRECTION (2005-09-13 18:14:56): Engineering informs me that AIM presence shows up on the other Contacts views - not just the Names view. Even better!!!

Today is an exciting day for the open source fans at the office—we�ve officially announced the first beta of the Plaxo Toolbar for Thunderbird. If you�re already a Plaxo member, just go straight to the download page and get started! If not, just register for a Plaxo account first, it should only take a minute. :)

It�s no secret that we�ve been planning a Thunderbird client for some time now but we wanted to make sure we got some crucial things right, including:

• Cross platform support—this means the client was written in JavaScript and is packaged in a standard XPI—so it will work on Mac and Linux as well as on Windows.
• An easy sync experience with your Plaxo address book and all the other address books Plaxo supports—this means you can sync your personal Thunderbird account with your Outlook account at work, and/or access your Thunderbird contacts on the Web from anywhere.
• An enhanced Thunderbird address book with some of the popular features from our Outlook toolbar—such as the "Click to Connect" button when reading your e-mail, support for photos and microBlogs in your address book, and one-click access to Plaxo Online.
• Most of the usual Plaxo features that you are used to.

If you use Thunderbird, give our toolbar a try and let us know what you think. We�d love to hear your comments and feedback on our forum or through e-mail at beta [at] plaxo.com.

btw: This represents a big step for Plaxo—as we continue to expand the platforms we support—since it reaches an entirely new set of people that we have not been able to support. Expect to see more platforms later this year. Note that many Plaxo users are not aware the we already support Internet Explorer and Yahoo! (beta).

Thanks and enjoy,
The Plaxo Team

PS: For you developers out there, note that we�ve released this toolbar under the Mozilla Public License, which means it�s open source and you�re free to tinker with it. To help facilitate, we�ve set up a developer area on the Plaxo forums. We�re also actively working on an open API that will let anyone Plaxo-enable their favorite application, so stay tuned!

This is Dru Nelson, the Plaxo engineer that built most of Plaxo for Thunderbird. He's a great guy, good friend, and a heckuvan engineer!

We've been hard at work improving and extending the Plaxo service and we recently released new versions of both our toolbar for Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express as well as our web version, Plaxo Online.

In the latest toolbar, we've rehauled the internals to dramatically increase performance and stability. We also added "find as you type" (ala Firefox) to the Update Contacts Wizard. Everyone should upgrade to this version when they get a chance.

In Plaxo Online, we've fixed a number of bugs and improved performance as well. We've also added several new features, some of which we recently announced in our Plaxo Beta Program:

• Birthday reminders - all new members will now receive reminder e-mails a week before anyone in their address book has a birthday coming up. You can click send a free e-card, buy a printed birthday card, or send flowers or gifts through our partners, including Barnes & Noble, RedEnvelope. Best of all, Plaxo can pre-fill the billing and shipping information from your address book (with your permission) so that you don't have to type it in yourself. You can turn off birthday reminders for individuals or altogether—as usual, you are in complete control. Existing users that want to enable birthday reminders should visit their Account Settings and check "E-mail Birthday Reminders" under the notification preferences section.
• Send-to-phone - all members can now use Plaxo Online to send address book entries to their mobile phone without any extra software, cables, or syncing. Simply click "send to phone" next to a contact and it will be sent wirelessly to your phone, where you can accept it and add it to your phone's address book.
• Holiday list maker - If you're planning to send gifts or cards this holiday season, Plaxo can help you build up your holiday recipient list and make sure you have the information you need. Choose people from your address book and we'll list them for you with their mailing addresses. You can edit the addresses yourself or ask the people on your list for an update. Once your list is ready, you can print it as a handy reference. Even better, you can send printed holiday cards to the people on your list, and Plaxo will fill in the addresses so you don't have to write out all the envelopes. You can make your holiday list now or look for the new "Holiday list" button in your Plaxo Online contact list.
• And more - don't forget to check out our new Duplicate Contact Remover and Plaxo Mobile Access, both available inside the Plaxo Beta Program.
  

We hope you enjoy the new features, as well as the increases in reliability and performance. Many of the features we added and bugs we fixed came from user feedback, which we always appreciate. Please continue to let us know if you encounter any problems or have any suggestions!

Thanks,
The Plaxo Team

We're announcing a deal with Yahoo! today where Plaxo 2.0 (to be released later this month) will feature Yahoo! Search from within the Plaxo Toolbar, inside Outlook and Outlook Express. This is the first time that a major Web search engine will be available from inside Outlook. There are a lot of times when I'm reading something in my inbox and I want to search on it, but right now I have to fire up a Web browser and type in the keywords. Now I can just search directly from within Outlook, without losing the thread of what I'm reading. We plan to offer even tighter integration of search and e-mail in future versions of Plaxo, so this is just the beginning of what we have in mind.

Plaxo 2.0 will also have a bunch of other cool features, so stand by. As always, you can still download Plaxo 1.5 today from our Web site and then upgrade easily (and of course for free) to 2.0 when it's released.

Read the press release at http://www.plaxo.com/about/releases/release-20040513

We just released version 1.5.1 of the Plaxo Outlook and Outlook Express plugin. This release contains some new features as well as numerous bug fixes and performance enhancements.

Some noteworthy changes:

• new "Build Your Address Book" wizard, a power-user feature to automatically add people to your address book that you e-mail frequently
• improved installer is more firewall-friendly and can detect and fix many common installation problems
• you can now send update request e-mails from any of your validated e-mail addresses (previously you could only send from your primary e-mail address)
• Enhanced user interface for synchronization progress dialog and preferences dialog
• fixed a bug where some address data got hidden for outlook express users
• numerous minor bug fixes (many pointed out to us by our users!)

To get the latest version of Plaxo, go to http://www.plaxo.com/downloads and click "Download Plaxo Now". Please post comments if you experience any problems.

Thanks,
The Plaxo Team