Thoughts and experiences from an enterprise software architect.
This is a personal weblog by Jorgen Thelin, a Senior Program Manager for Windows Live Identity Services at Microsoft in Redmond.
The opinions expressed here represent my own views and not those of my current, prior or future employer(s).
After a prompt from John McDowall, I have tried out the Plaxo tools for keeping my contacts list up to date, and it definitely scratches an itch for me! When I counted up, I had 4 different mail programs over 3 different machines, and all of them had a slightly different set of address book entries. With Plaxo, I now have a single consolidated list, automatically synced across all the machines, and which will automatically be updated when any other members of the Plaxo network amends their details.
The question about the business model behind these "online networks" (of which Plaxo is one example) is being raised again as they are starting to gain more interest and momentum now. I wonder how long it will be before I have to start putting a price on the utility of this service to me if Plaxo ever start charging for the service. However, I wondered the same thing back in November 2002, so maybe it won't happen.
Personally, I haven't rushed into the other online "social networks" such as Orkut / Friendster / LinkedIn yet because I'm not looking for a date, I'm not looking for a job, and I don't need to answer the "6 degrees of seperation" question too often at the moment - hence no immediate itch to scratch. However, I will be watching with interest the experiences of John, Becky and other.
The other thing I really want is some way to auto-synchronized my favourites / bookmark lists across these machines too. That's defintely an itch needing scratching!
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