Wired News: Napster Co-Founder's New Venture

Sean Parker is at it again. This time it's not about the sharing of music but the sharing of contact info. I think it is a very cool tool. Here's how it works:

A Plaxo user sends plain-text e-mails to friends and colleagues requesting contact information updates. Recipients can reply to the request by updating their info in the template provided or by e-mailing free-form text, which Plaxo parses using natural language processing technology. It integrates seamlessly with Outlook.

Eventually everyone has the software and whenever you update your contact info, it is automatically updated to everyone in your contact list.

Sure it's beta and there are bugs. Also, I'm sure some people will hate getting requests to update their contact info.

There has to be some big brother marketing scenario to this down the road though:-)

[Rick here with an update: I have received a few of these Plaxo requests to update my info at this point, including from Nick Denton, who has also written about this. Seems pretty cool. I'll probably get around to using it myself at some point, depending on how painless it is and whether it integrates into Eudora and Palm, as I'm not an Outlook man. I decided to cross-reference this also as "CRM" in the sense of contact management. Sure, it's low-end by Siebel standards of CRM, but what is more essential for all business people than managing their contacts. -R.]