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Syncronizing Your Way to Success

Having the ability to synchronize all of your work, contacts and other such important aspects of daily life is a great way to keep track and stay on top of things. In the world of the web, synchronization is crucial, and having one application that takes care of everything together is a wonderful tool. Developers of all stripes can now leverage the infrastructure of Plaxo to add synchronized address book contacts to their sites and applications. As with most Web 2.0 approaches, Plaxo now has an open API.

The new tools are intended to extend the footprint of Plaxo`s connected synchronized contact model. Plaxo is a service that enables synchronization of contacts and can be plugged into e-mail clients, such as Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird. It is also part of AOL` s new instant messaging client Triton. Open APIs have worked well in the past year as developer and application building tools for a number of major companies, including eBay and Google. It is a trend that Plaxo wants to capitalize on. There are actually three levels of access that Plaxo is now providing based on user need, all of which are free for non-commercial use.

Rikk Carey, executive vice president of engineering and operations, explained that the a JavaScript Address Book Access Widget is at the entry level. The widget is much easier for a wider array of users to take advantage of, as it only involves a small code snippet to be inserted on a user`s site. The widget is a one-way application allowing users to access their contact data, but not to edit or change it. In terms of a full, more traditional API, Plaxo has one that will work as a read-only API, as well as another that will provide full two-way capabilities.