This article was published on January 16, 2008

Pulse integration with Mac is just the beginning


Pulse integration with Mac is just the beginning

addressbookPulse is now available for your Mac Address Book and takes care of all your syncing needs. The Plaxo service wants to stay an ‘useful social application that helps people stay connected’. In order to live up to that mission, integration with the Address Book was necessary, according to the press release: “Since most of our members are busy professionals, it’s not enough to enable communication just within the Pulse website; we need to bring Pulse – and the unified address book underlying it – to the communication tools, services, and devices that they use.”

Isn’t that against the trend of moving workspace from the desktop to the browser? We asked John McCrea, VP of Marketing. His answer: “We are working toward a vision of the ‘social web’ in which the social graph is able to turbocharge any site, application, or device with users to take their local piece of the social graph with them wherever they go.”

So it’s basically a way of making sure that people have access to their contacts wherever they go. Until full wireless Internet coverage isn’t a dream anymore, this sounds like a plausible reason.

Yet I do think that this whole syncing thing also is a way to tempt people to move their workspace to online applications, such as Pulse. By giving people the feeling that their stuff ALSO remains on their computer, they’re willing to give the online application a try. So this won’t be the last integration tool we will hear of in the near future. What about Google Calendar syncing two-ways with iCal?

Pulse and Mac

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