Plaxo has joined the Macworld fun with an update to its OS X Address Book tool which now incorporates your contact's Pulse feed into OS X's Address Book application. Like Yahoo, Google and others, Plaxo sees the address book as the most likely place to manage your social networks, which are, after all, just an extension of your contacts.
The new version of Plaxo's Mac client, which you can download now, pulls in a small widget which sits to the right side of your contact cards just as the previous version did. However, the widget now displays the latest items from that person's pulse feed so you can see links to Twitter posts, Flickr photos, recent Diggs and whatever else that person might be doing — provided they've agreed to share that info with you.
The OS X widget still synchronizes data from Apple's Address Book and iCal applications just as previous versions have.
Unfortunately, because of the way Apple's Address Book integrates with Mail (or rather doesn't, besides auto-complete and the option to open a small panel showing e-mail addresses), Plaxo's update is something of a letdown. It could just be me, but I rarely actually open Address Book so feeding in the Pulse stream doesn't do much for me, though that's not Plaxo's fault.
Plaxo's Thunderbird integration is somewhat more robust providing inline contact info within your mail, though so far the Thunderbird add-on hasn't seen a Pulse update like today's announcement or the recently updated Outlook add-on. In short, if you tend to keep Address Book open all the time, you'll like today's release, but otherwise giving your Address Book a Pulse feed might be pointless.
That said, there's little question that the address book makes a convenient hub for keeping up with your social network contacts, but to paraphrase Steve Jobs' reference to AppleTV, so far, most attempts still don't get it right.
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