Plaxo + LinkedIn + iPhone = Brilliant

TechCrunch has been hard on unified address book provider Plaxo in the past, and probably with due cause, given their previous spam promoting ways, but I am now reevaluating that view based on Plaxo Sync.

I wrote about Plaxo’s improved Sync features back in June; although it sounded good I didn’t really have cause to use it then. Confronted with a “how do I sync various platforms, including the iPhone” problem I hit Google looking for a solution, and I kept finding user recommendations for Plaxo. Plaxo’s Sync tools support a variety of platforms, including Outlook, Internet Explorer (for Yahoo Address Books) Mac OSX and Thunderbird. Unfortunately they can’t sync with Gmail yet, but they can download your contacts from Gmail, although it does sync with Google Calendar.

Plaxo can also download LinkedIn contacts; LinkedIn does offer downloads/ plugins as well but nothing quite as comprehensive as Plaxo. We’ve looked recently at Facebook replacing LinkedIn as a business networking tool, however being able to access LinkedIn connections via Plaxo makes LinkedIn all that much more useful as it delivers access to LinkedIn contacts everywhere, including the iPhone (Plaxo imports into the Mac OSX address book, that can then be synced to an iPhone via iTunes).

The other selling point of Plaxo is the universal contact nature of the product; the ability for people to update their contact details on Plaxo and push that information out to other people is a definite positive.

The basic Plaxo service is free, including the sync functionality. The $49.95 upgrade adds Plaxo support (which if it works well you should never need to use) and duplication filtering. The duplicate filtering tool isn’t brilliant, it missed some duplicates on a test, but after running it a second time it found more; a handy feature but perhaps not worth the $49.95 annual fee.

Hacks Make Their Way Into Yahoo Products

Yahoo Hack days are a lot of fun, and some pretty interesting stuff comes out of them. But a persistent question is whether or not they are much more than fun - and if any of these hacks ever make their way into actual products.

The answer, apparently, is yes. Tonight Yahoo is announcing two product feature launches that were originally created at Yahoo Hack Days. - Shop By Color and MapMixer.

MapMixer

MapMixer is a tool that lets users “pin up” their own image over Yahoo Maps. The two images are melded to create a hybrid version that can be saved and viewed privately or made public - users can also adjust opacity and perform other tweaks to make it look just right. The ideal use is to add a very detailed map to the existing, less detailed Yahoo map. The melded map can also be embedded in a non-Yahoo website. See images to right and below for examples.

Google Maps allows various types of annotations, but nothing exactly like this.

Shop By Color

Shop by Color is a new Yahoo Shopping feature that lets users search or narrow results by selecting one of 56 different color hues instead of typing the color in manually.

Like.com, which we’ve covered recently, also allows image searching with non-text as the input. What Yahoo is launching is a lot different, but it is exciting to see image search moving beyond purely descriptive text as the input. Images can be queried directly, whereas previously just the metadata around an image could be queried.

Both were developed at Yahoo!’s Q1 2007 internal hack day on March 23rd. Hayro Kolukisaoglu and Sundeep Tirumalareddy created Shop by Color, and Nimit Maru created MapMixer.

Can Google Do What Amazon Couldn’t? The Search For Steve Fossett In The Nevada Desert

When computer scientist Jim Gray was lost at sea earlier this year, Amazon stepped in to help. They arranged for a satellite sweep of the area and stored the images on their S3 storage service. They then created a task on their Mechanical Turk service to allow volunteers to scan the images to look for the boat. Thousands of people joined the search, but he was never found.

Now Steve Fossett, a 63 year old aviator, sailor and adventurer with a number of world records, has disappeared as well. On September 3, an airplane he was flying in Nevada failed to return. No one has any idea where he is.

His friend Richard Branson now says he will use Google Earth to try and find Fossett. Google may have taken new satellite photos over the last few days which may have information that can help find him.

With Gray, there was a lot of data to review and a boat appears as a very small number of pixels in a given satellite image. Looking for a plane, or even a weather disturbance, in the Nevada desert may not be much easier. Still, if Branson and/or Google call for volunteers to help with the search, I am sure that thousands will join the effort. And once again, Mechanical Turk would be a perfect way to organize the volunteers, even if they are looking at Google data.

Let’s all hope that this has a happier ending than the Jim Gray story.