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Hey there Plaxo users! We've been hinting for months now about an all-new and improved version of Plaxo Online (called "Plaxo 3.0"...very creative, huh?). And, we are almost ready to go prime-time, but first we need help testing it on our most daring, helpful, and dedicated users (before unleashing it on everyone else). So, if you are a passionate user of Plaxo and an "early adopter" of new technology, you can volunteer for the private beta. The first 1,000 people who send an empty e-mail to privatebeta@plaxo.com will be given instructions on how to get started in a couple of weeks. [Note: we will not read or reply to the emails sent to privatebeta@plaxo.com.] What’s included?
Hope to see you in the beta, P.S. In case you don't know, "Plaxo Online" is what you get when you log in to www.plaxo.com and use your Plaxo account (as opposed to accessing Plaxo via Outlook or Outlook Express). |  Teamwork pays off! Join us in testing Plaxo 3.0! |
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
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
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.