Plaxo launched their Plaxo 3.0 (beta) today with much fan fair. Woohoo! I can sync my Google Calendar! Woohoo I can sync Yahoo! Woohoo I can still sync Outlook! Woohoo I can sync LinkedIn (if I pay)! It's all free! Free! Free! Unless…
First warning sign was Scoble having trouble using Outlook 2007 and the new Plaxo toolbar. I had shied away from Plaxo for a while because of that. Hmm. I was having a good bit of trouble getting it working. It get stalling. Second, and the stake in Plaxo?s heart for me, was from Web Worker Daily. I noted a mention that a $50/yr premium subscription would allow syncing of more than 1000 contacts. Uh oh. Before I could sync my 1800+ contacts (I?m now down to 1752), but I couldn?t use the duplicate remover, etc. That?s fine, I could deal with that. I didn?t thing WWD could be right, so I had to check for myself. Yep, if I want to sync all of my contacts I have to pay $50 a month. Nice job of letting me know Plaxo.
Lots of us who have been around in business for a while have a ton of contacts. The contact lists for some of the VCs I know must be immense. I guess they are paying or leaving. Source: Should I manage my contacts with Plaxo?
Yeah if you have >1000 contacts, and even if you were all synced before (I have about 1800 contacts up there, though my actual contact count is down to 1750), you're pretty much shut out now. Done. Toast. Finito. Oh, unless you want to pay $50 a year. No, that isn't a lot of money, but I was a user of the service. I did recommend it to others. I'm going to give Plaxo a day or two to respond to me or offer some information (I'm going to leave a comment on the post announcing the release), and then if nothing, I'm just going to delete my account and everything. Why? Because it's not worth it to sync up a portion of my contacts. Who wants that?
Yeah, Plaxo you blew it on this one. How much do you want to bet that a lot of the people who are review your new beta have more than 1000 contacts? Umm, all of them? Either they are going to have to be giving away free Premium memberships like candy, lift the cap on free accounts, or see a lot of account deletions.
Not good if you want to be acquired.
Update: I was wrong. It appears that by trying to sync Outlook and Gmail and getting stalled with all the traffic it seemed that I couldn't do it. Well encouraged by Robert (PacificIT), who got it to work with his 3,000 contacts, I tried again and everything synced up nicely. Thank you to Joseph Smarr who left the comment to officially set me straight.
