Plaxo, Lots to Love.. Connectivity is the best part!

Social networking made it worth my time, and in fact gave me quite a bit of productivity gains from well designed tools that make a difference in business and community function. For most social networking utilities, one person or feature attracts us to 'give it a try'. It is the perceived value that keeps us coming back.

What do you expect from networking? For me it's a few key rules.

• Accessibility and portability-- my contacts and your features delivers value and time savings.
• Great free functionality easily available, continuously evolving premium functionality for business value.
  
• Extensibility of the importance of open source community networking that interoperates rather than uses technology to collaborate rather than innovates in a proprietary method.
  
• Ease of access, ease of use.
  
• Awareness of the evolving 2.0 Personal networking, 3.0 Business networking needs for development.
  
• I 'own' my contacts and being a good citizen for the technology I employ to communicate to them. You 'own' the rules of use and development. Let's work together to build something uncommonly great!
  

Functionality Wishlist for Plaxo:

• Pulse Stream Groups of Groups by topic, or LIST ALL option to learn of new public groups that might be of interest.
• Self subscribe communication preference features for Pulse and Group activity.
• Signature file portable to other applications... . For goodness sake, it started as an address book, include a default sigfile option portable to other systems that allows you to hold your business/work contacts in a variety of self styledwidgets.
  
• Create more customization in the landing page for a community, so that when you share a message, you can also create a personality view when your name is clicked.
  

Plaxo's new Pulse and Group functionality is a great compliment to an established business professionals network. While we may not have many hours to keep in touch, we can use the PULSE functionality to automatically share and keep in touch with one another, regarding what is changing. You can share or learn what is new with Plaxo and your chosen network. You can add your favorite feeds from sites you use and enjoy to share with your connections, and specify who gets to see them, you can create a lifetream widget to share to your other social networking sites... all goodness

We now are enjoying the GROUP functionality to share best business practices on topics we have in common. Groups allow you to Create and join groups for yoru company, organizations, or friends. One of my favorite groups for PLAXO is Plaxo Best Practices. Here our leaders get to compare notes about community building, success features, and future enhancements we would like to see.

I have been with Plaxo the longest of all my network for one key function, and that is it's useful Address Book Utility. I am a change agent in life and in business. Part of our grand adventures is that we are on the move. With each move, there are treasured relationships that I do not want to lose touch with, and there is the reality that we are all changing at our own pace-- names change, addresses, work information etc.. What I hated experiencing was discovering a business possibility of interest to a colleague only to discover that all 5 chicken scratched home and business contacts were null in my hand written organizer. I then tried to keep it all together by remembering to update my contacts in a content management software, but THAT only worked as well as I worked it. With Plaxo, Address Book, we stay connected and reachable regardless of who remembered our cell phone died, or that she stopped working at that company 5 years ago.

I became a premium member to take advantage of the cool premium eCards functionality. People for the most part, want to be remembered, and intend to keep in touch, but often life gets in the way. I liked this because I received a few eCards on my birthday and the first thing I appreciated is 'wow', they remembered, how nice! Plaxo became my administrator to the events and birthday's to remember-- with a ready vehicle for creating attractive messages for when I am thinking of colleagues to remind them they mattered.

Premium features allowed me to:

• Sync my Plaxo account with LinkedIn
• Remove Duplicates from my contact list and even my Outlook calendar
• Back Up Contacts between devices
• and Send nice quality and personalized eCards to my colleagues and friends.
• As my network grew, I used and enjoyed using the Plaxo tips to Organize my address book for easier navigation
• Now they have Plaxo Mobile Sync to keep your phones current while on the move, too.
  

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LINKEDIN2HELPING FRIENDS

• Business Network
• Jobs Network
  

Socials: LinkedIn | Ryze | MySpace | Ning | Hi5 | MerchantCircle | Plaxo |

Yahoos: Jobs | HR | Telecommuters | LI HFCN | TheSecret | Careers |

Dawn: | Frappr | Friendster | Hi5 | Jaxster | Jobster | Konnects| Lijit | Linked In | MyBlogLog | MySpace | Naymz | Ning | Plaxo | Ryze || Stumble | Tribe | Twitter | Viadeo | Xing | Yahoo | Zaadz