Alec Saunders SquawkBox

I've made no secret of the fact that I am a fan of Plaxo.  The ability to backup and replicate contacts and calendar information, combined with the ability to automatically update contacts with new information, make it a killer app.  I've been using it for a long time.

Last week I loaded their new beta — Plaxo 3.0.  Today is the unveiling.  Others have written much about it, so I won't bother with every detail.  However, for me, there are two new killer features:

1. It synchronizes across many new data sources.  As of Friday I had one master address book and calendar, in Plaxo, which now feeds Outlook (and by extension my Blackberry), hotmail, and GMail.  While Plaxo can import LinkedIn contacts, it doesn't synch them back, which is too bad.  Nonetheless, I've now combined all my address books, deduped them, and synched them back.  That's a first.
2. It now knows how to behave in an Exchange server environment.  Previously, if you installed Plaxo on more than one PC attached to an exchange server, you would have bizarre behaviour including multiple items replicated in the address books and contacts.  Now it knows about each and every PC, and ensures that updates happen correctly.

They've also become much more open, implementing SyncML, which means that any SyncML enabled address book or contact list should be easier to integrate with Plaxo.  Nice move! 

I haven't played with their slick new web UI much yet, primarily due to the same observations as Om Malik and Robert Scoble made — it's slow. Nor have I played with their new (and very nice looking) mobile app, since they only support US carriers.

Plaxo 3.0 is a great step forward. 

After all the attention that Grand Central has received, the rumour on the street is that they may have been acquired by Google for a cool $50 million. If true, it reveals a lot more of Google's hand than we've seen previously.  Until now, they've studiously avoided any knd of service which connects them directly with the PSTN.  GoogleTalk famously relies on third parties to provide origination and termination services.  With Grand Central in the mix, however, that would no longer be true.  Grand Central's message of One Phone Number, for life also fits nicely with Google's aspirations to be your one mailbox, and online identity resource. 

Reports are that LinkedIn will provide an API, opening up to developers a la Facebook.  It may take nine months to do it.  In my opinion, that may be too long to wait.  Facebook has momentum now, and with their API, are capable of exerting extreme competitive pressure on LinkedIn now.  Example: some months ago, LinkedIn implemented a feature called Answers that allows you to ask your network a question and receive answers from the people you trust.  Within a week of the Facebook Platform launch, independent developer Jeremiah Robinson had created My Questions, a Facebook app that does substantially the same thing, by placing a question in your profile.  LinkedIn is about jobs, resumes and connections.  How long before we see Facebook Jobs, Facebook Resumes, and Facebook Introductions?  And likely provided by third parties.

I wouldn't count LinkedIn out yet.  They've got a pile of cash and a working business model.  But like many others, much of my networking is moving to Facebook now.  Nine months to an API is a long time.

UPDATE: Over lunch it was pointed out to me that Facebook Marketplace already implements jobs.  Check!

That was yesterday morning's Facebook update.  It turns out to have generated a fair amount of interest.  People wrote asking if I had blown myself up yet, commented that they had just bought a new BBQ rather than clean up the old one, and so on.  I thought about buying a new one, but my old Weber Genesis 1000 was expensive when I bought it 12 years ago (around $500), and would have been even more expensive to replace ($799 at Home Depot). Aside from some rusting parts inside, the exterior was in good shape. So I ordered up replacement burners, flavor bars, and grills from Capital Appliance & BBQ, dismantled and cleaned the BBQ, and reassembled it.

Here's the BBQ.

And here are the rotten parts I removed.  The flavour bars were so rusted that pieces had fallen into the drip pan below, and were collecting grease which causes fires.  Notice that the parts of the burners that were inside the kettle are rusted (although still pretty solid!), while the parts on the outside are like new — shiny shiny shiny!  They're nice solid pieces of stainless steel, but the traces of moisture in liquid propane cause the burners to eventually rust.

And here are the shiny new burners installed, plus new stainless flavour bars, and and stainless grills.  I decided to try the stainless bars rather than the porcelain coated, at the recommendation of the folks at Capital BBQ. 

And all put back together. 

Alec is done with rebuilding BBQ. New burners, flavor bars, grills, and a (relatively) thorough cleaning. Now VERY VERY dirty. 2:39pm

Total time — 3:00 hours.  After reassembly, it worked like new again. It's capable of heating to inferno temperatures for searing steaks, and also the gentlest of slow cooking temperatures.  Total cost to refurbish was in the neighborhood of $400 — half the price of a new Weber — and my perfectly good old barbeque hasn't been prematurely consigned to the landfill.

The toughest part about the whole job was cleaning and cleanup.  The shower was a welcome relief, but even so a day later I've still got dirt ground into my skin and fingernails. 

Octopz is a collaboration tool for the creative folks in your life.  It's a simple metaphor for the real world of collaborative media creation.  You can look at a document, graphic, or video together over the internet, mark it up, and leave digital "post-it" notes in place for the eventual editor of the document to be able to recall the conversation.  Supporting a huge range of document types, it's useful in all kinds of situations. 

• Medicine: Imagine two doctors examining a high resolution image of an x-ray, and marking it up with a shared pen, before surgery.
• Engineering: Because it supports vector graphic image types, it can be used to zoom in to supply very detailed views of architectural or drafting diagrams.
• Advertising: Supporting both video and image document types, it can be used to collaboratively edit and mark-up these documents. 
• Web-Site creation: Take whole mock-ups of sites, mark-up placement, graphics and more. 

I had the opportunity to spend some time with CEO Ron McKenzie at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference, who showed me endless examples.  The entire time we worked on various examples, his collaborator Barry was visible in a video conference window.  We were able to carry on a conversation with Barry while marking up various documents at the same time. 

Priced at $99 per month per license (per simultaneous meeting), it's easy to imagine this product becoming an inexpensive and indispensible must-have for web design shops and creative teams everywhere.

Check out the Octopz corporate blog, also.