Plaxo 3.0 review

Here's a quick review of my experience with the latest Plaxo 3.0 released on Monday.

I've was introduced spamed by numerous Outlook invitations to Plaxo many years ago and thus created a profile. I was never hooked on it and continued to use Yahoo addressbook while secretly waiting to see if Google will come out with a better "contacts" solution in the Gmail. Now that I'm on a Mac, I've started using the AddressBook.app. So now I got my contacts spread out in various places: Yahoo, Gmail, AddressBook.app, PINE (yes, I still use that) and of course home frig (we'll have to deal with that one later...)

So I'm a perfect candidate for Plaxo 3.0. I jumped on it immediately yesterday and decided to give it a try. Twenty minutes into it, all kinds of issues came out, I didn't have the time to debug into the problem (I shouldn't have to as a regular consumer, right?). Here's a list of problems I ran into

• I downloaded the OSX plugin that allows Plaxo to sync my AddressBook.app and add a button to my Mail.app (while Jason waited). The first few sync worked fine, but then I got myself very familiar with the shape and shade of the spinning beach ball. The Plaxo plugin froze my system and forced me to hard-reboot 3 times! I have since uninstalled it and all is fine again (w/o Plaxo).
• The site was slooooow....
• I love AJAX and all, but when a site has "feature" that requires double-click (need to double click on Contact on the left pane to have it open detail on the right), it irks me. It's very counter-intuitive to have to double-click on a web page, unless I'm playing a flash game or something.

I do understand they're still in beta and after all it is free, so I won't complain too much more. Let me know if you tried Plaxo and what's your experience?