So, a month after joining Plaxo, I think it's been really useful for me. I signed onto it basically because three old friends, one running international aid programs in Africa, one deputy head of an OSCE mission in the former Soviet Union, and one former ambassador who is looking for a big international job, had all signed up and I got pinged by their Plaxo accounts asking to update my contact details and inviting me to join.

Then I joined up and discovered that other people I vaguely knew who were also members included a raddled Brussels journalist, a Balkan presidential adviser, a retired Serbian colonel, a senior Belgian diplomat, and a couple of millionaires.

Four people have joined Plaxo because I pinged them with update requests - my former assistant, a distant cousin, a friend in Montenegro and an old acquaintance recently renewed in Brussels. Several others have joined and I got updated automatically because they were in my contacts folder, including a Macedonian playwright and a Daily Telegraph journalist.

But I am beginning to wonder: is Plaxo uniquely useful to those of us involved in politics type stuff? Are there other networks which are useful for, say, fossil fuel traders, or social workers, or academics (none of my Plaxo contacts is in full-time academe although such people are probably over-represented among my contacts)?

And yes, there have been a few people who have replied by sending me their updated details but not through the Plaxo form - all of them lefties who have infiltrated the system (eg my BBC friend). That's OK. Plaxo is a time-saver but one has to appreciate that not everyone likes interacting with it.

I've signed up to this address-book management site, Plaxo. I've let it loose on my Outlook address book and have been very impressed by the results. On the other hand it's going to be rather difficult to do on my non-work contacts because I use Eudora for my home email and have never bothered with the address book - which itself looks pretty clunky. I started last night trying to create an address book inside Eudora with the idea being that I would then somehow import it to Outlook at work and then integrate it with the Plaxo list. But Eudora crashed within a quarter of an hour, so I may have to try another tactic...

There seems to have been a lot of paranoia on some of the discussion boards about Plaxo. I have to say that for me the convincing thing was when the first two friends of mine using it turned out to be an American who administers large amounts of foreign aid for Africa and a European who has a sensitive political posting in the Caucasus. I reckoned if they felt it was secure enough for their needs, it is very unlikely to be unsatisfactory for me.