Plaxo, per their site,‚ keeps people connected by solving the common and frustrating problem of out-of-date contact information. Plaxo is a site much like LinkedIn, in that it is a community with free and fee services for networking with business associates, and keeping in touch with family and friends. Plaxo can be thought of as an online rolodex for all of your contacts, with users having the option to show physical addresses, emails, phone numbers and fully detailed profiles.

Plaxo has well over 15M users currently and has created a ton of buzz recently with the addition of their social networking feature, Plaxo Pulse, which creates a stream of information on what other users are doing that you are directly connected to. See the screen shot below as an example:

Plaxo has a real “LinkedIn” feel with the ability to peer into other people’s connections to see who is in their network, and with the ability to send messages and invitations to “connect” with others. Below you can see that Adam Boone (a connection of mine) has several people in his “connections” that I don’t know and gives me the‚ option to reach out to them through‚ the Plaxo network. Sound‚ familiar?‚ 

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Plaxo let’s you “hook up” with other sites and tools that you use and syncs directly with them, such as Outlook and LinkedIn for example - that way anyone who is in your other address books will come over to Plaxo. From there you can notify these people you are on Plaxo. Plaxo also has search features to find other Plaxo users, which comes in handy for recruiters, internet sourcers, researchers and others. In addition, Plaxo has groups, where users network on specific topics (another great opening for fellow recruiters and sourcers). A final note - like LinkedIn - the larger your network is (the more people you are connected to), the more people you can see in Plaxo.

Sponsored by SmashFly Technologies, Provider of WildFire, The First Job Marketing Platform