I’ve been using Plaxo on and off for a few years now. It started off as a contact management system, which was useful, and a social network of sorts. Then it added calendar synchronisation, also good. Its latest incarnation, Plaxo 3.0, aggregates feeds from ALL your contacts social networks and plays it back to you…. which, of course, makes it completely useless as you get far more information than you need. With Scoble, Calacanis in my “network”, and people like Simon and Chris, I get far more updates than I could reasonably shake a stick at. Seriously, I start shaking the stick and it just shatters under the weight of Twitters, Flickr updates etc. etc.

Anyway, that’s not what this post is about, pointless though Plaxo Pulse is. This post is about the “known issues” with Plaxo that have forced me to abandon my $50 investment in the service. The known issues are…

1) The de-duper also deletes random contacts for no reason other than, well, it feels like it
2) Calendar synchronisation over multiple PCs in the same timezone results in recurring appointments sliding further and further back in time
3) And not an issue, but could I sync my contacts with Google Mail, please?

Repeated searches through the forums flagged both of these as recurring issues for some users, and therefore you’d have thought they’d be addressed… sadly, not. I should probably log them as faults and see if I can reclaim my investment, but I suspect they’ll put it down to the vagaries of my system configuration… which will do me precisely zero good, yet waste me considerable time.

sigh. Well, my Google Analytics referral list has taught me that blog posts will sit up here and gather traffic like dust on a pile of messy PC cables, so I’ve at least put this out there for others who experience similar issues. If any of you find a solution, please let me know!