One of the goals that I set for myself during this little work hiatus was to get my personal data off of my desktop & scribbled notes. By ‘personal data’ I’m referring to all of that information that we all carry around in one fashion or another that gets us through the connected world – emails, contacts, finances, etc.,
I started with email a few years ago, and that’s worked out pretty well so far. I use Google Mail & Yahoo mail to manage my mail online. Yahoo accepts all of my potential spam while Google mail routes and services all of my personal mail which I generally have sent to knuetter.com.
The next step was to get my bookmarks off of my computers (work, home, etc.,) and I chose Del.icio.us for that service. I’m not completely satisfied with the service (I will probably try out Digg one of these days) but they provide a pretty straightforward service and a few nice tools like Firefox integration that make me happy enough.
Next was my calendar, which I used Google for as I wrote about in an earlier post.
Recently I decided to give Plaxo a try. Over the years I’ve received a few requests to join and so when I was looking for a way to organize my contacts they were a natural choice. Their system lets you plug in all of your various contact points (outlook, gmail, yahoo mail, apple address book, etc.,) and it will then gather all of the contacts and publish them out to all of these so that they’re all kept in sync. Additionally, if any of your contacts are using the service, it will automatically update your contact lists when they change their information. So far I’ve found it to be pretty useful and while a few features I would like are hidden behind the annual service charge, I’ve mostly been able to work around that though if I continue to find the service useful I’ll certainly consider upgrading.
One of the nice surprises about Plaxo is that it also syncs calendars and to-do lists so the Google Calendar syncing that I set up earlier may not be necessary. One of the downsides to Plaxo is that they’re desperately trying to get into the social networking space, so I fear random sporadic updates ala facebook. Hopefully they don’t go too far down this path.
Next up, I’ve got to figure out how to securely store passwords online and I’m still debating whether I want to aggregate all of my finances (ala Quicken) online or whether I’m OK with each of the individual banking websites that I use. In each case I have to decide whether I’m confident enough in internet security to handle these items.