Remember Plaxo? The address book that auto-synced your contacts in Outlook?  Well after surviving the web 2.0 era, a Comcast acquisition and the rise of social networking, Plaxo is returning to its roots.  This includes a segue out of social networking and a refocus on the address book, unveiling Plaxo Personal Assistant.  It’s a completely new service that intelligently makes automatic updates to your address book, so the contact information is always fresh and relevant.  It’s a premium service that touts reliability as its core competency, and has a series of settings for personalizing how and when your address book is updated.

But nearly a decade after launch, is it really still relevant? We have smartphones now, most of which come with Facebook integration that pools with our phone contacts, giving us all sorts of information, like birthdays, upcoming events, addresses and even phone numbers.  I can’t remember the last time I had to ask someone for their information–it seems that Facebook, LinkedIn and Google’s entire product line have already done the work for me.

“There are companies that do bits and pieces of this,” Plaxo CEO Justin Miller says, acknowledging the growing competition around personal management tools.  “With MobileMe, Apple provides syncing within the stack. You’ve got syncing of contact info with Android to Gmail. But these companies are focused on address books only because it’s needed for their common device.  They’re not seeing address books as a destination. With us, we’re focused on making the best address book, integrating across a much broader expanse of devices than any other players.”

It’s the myriad of devices that’s given cause to Plaxo’s relaunch, in fact, as Miller notes that they’ve made address books even worse.  Because of social media and a widening array of devices, we actually need a centralized service that aggregates and updates contact information in the background.

One major update Plaxo’s including in this relaunch is the use of public data, which constantly seeks new information across sites and services to deliver the most relevant, aggregate profiles for your contacts.  Plaxo is scouring the web, Facebook pages and other publically accessed information in order to auto-update your address book without relying on manual updates from the individuals themselves.  It’s part of a larger trend towards inferring web data in order to create a personalized service.

So it’s because of social networking that Plaxo is able to offer this re-focused product, leveraging the free-willed sharing of information in order to provide a service around our relationships.  And since Plaxo has been around for so long, they also have a competitive advantage residing in their own database, which has been collecting and comparing contact information for several years.

“What we had to do with this project is really clean up our own database,” Miller explains.  “We’re ushering in a new wave of cloud services.  You put data in the cloud and it’s available to you wherever.  But with Plaxo Personal Assistant, you put it in the cloud, and it gets better.  It gets cleaned up and improved, and it’s available automatically.”

The ability to collectively take in data and apply it to automated, personalized utilities is part of a growing service industry that’s grown from long-standing and exchangeable data marketplaces. That means privacy is also key, and it’s something Plaxo’s designed into its products from day one.  Having built specs for OAuth that have been used by Hotmail, Gmail and a slew of others, Plaxo knows a few things about privacy within shared data networks.

“When we create a unique database, we take privacy very seriously. We built all Personal Assistant’s features around privacy, and we never share that data,” Miller notes emphatically.  “It’s your data and we allow you to move it everywhere–we’re the Switzerland of data.  This has been a helpful concept over the years, because destinations come and go, but Plaxo’s always here.”