I found out about Plaxo 3.0 going live because Joseph Smarr (who works at plaxo) and I are facebook friends and he had a presence message this morning that said he was excited about it going live.

Here is a view the link to on their home page - impressive syncing.
It still makes me wonder about having a function on most of these tools that gives access via 'myAPI' rather then via your username and password.

With LinkedIn saying that it was opening up this creates a whole new ball game. Those existing networks with many users have a lot of advantage over 'startups' getting people to join if they can figure out what services to offer and how to make it relevant.

I set up a new e-mail account and two yahoo groups last week for Farmer Joe's the local family owned store in my neighborhood. I could not believe how bad the user-interface was. Coming from sites like 37Signals HIghrise or BaseCamp or Facebook even. The quality is sooooo poor. I am glad their CEO is gone because if they don't get better fast they are going to die. They could be THE social network of choice for so many groups that us it but because of their lame functionality and lame adds they will just go elsewhere.