Plaxo moves away from social networking

Plaxo, creators of the ever popular address book, recently announced that it is phasing out its social network features as the company prepares for a major relaunch which will shift the focus back to managing users address books and subsequently see Plaxo return to its grass roots.

One of the biggest online management complexity issues is the increasing problem of how to keep contact information updated and relevant within the ever growing inter-connectedness of the web. This issue is of course not limited to the partial address books found in the social networking sphere and includes other web-based contact management applications, email and the dozen or more ways contact information is captured and recorded on mobile devices.

Managing these connections has never been more challenging, particularly when the need for instant, safe and up-to-date access of a user database is a prerequisite of every contact management system.

“The address book problem has not gone away, in fact it has become more important now because of the many different address books that people have,” says Justin Miller, Plaxo CEO.

In the past, Comcast company Plaxo has been efficient in handling out-of-date contact information by allowing users to sync their address book with the most popular platforms including Outlook, Mac Address Book and Gmail – eliminating duplicates, unifying contacts and allowing for broad range of synchronization across mobile devices. And, after nine years Plaxo is shifting the focus away from social networking and renewed its ambitions to return to its core focus: helping users manage multiple address books and become the primary address book service for mobile business professionals.

Miller mentions the return-to-roots focus for the company was made following a year-long project on the future progression of Plaxo.

“Facebook and LinkedIn already do a pretty good job in the social network space and fulfill most users’ needs. We have already begun phasing out our social network features,” argues Miller.

Plaxo have unveiled Plaxo Personal Assistant, a new service which automatically updates your address book so contact information is constantly relevant and is now available for download now, marking the company’s return to its address book-related services. Plaxo Personal Assistant is geared towards professionals who demand readily-available and reliable contact management software.

Still faithful to social networks, the new software will still enable users to pull in disparate sets of contacts from Facebook, LinkedIn, Gmail, Yahoo and more – but in a singular secure online address books and also syncs with all all the leading mobile platforms such as iOS, Android and Blackberry.