I’m at a little bit of a crossroads.
I’ve used Plaxo for several years, even through the “those guys are spammers” times. I’ve always benefited and enjoyed the service they offer. More than once they’ve saved me from inadvertent stupidity and a deleted Address Book. Now they’ve released their updated Plaxo 3.0 service and are launching their social networking service also.
All good, right?
Then there’s Google. I’ve never been much of a Gmail user. I use my Gmail address to subscribe to lists, mostly. I don’t ever use Gmail in a browser - I’m totally happy with Apple Mail and what it does for me, and I’ve usually got my MacBook Pro on hand. But Google Calendar is cool. I subscribe to several calendars for different things including my posting schedule for Web Worker Daily - Judi has us on a short leash 
- and I use Spanning Sync to keep iCal and Google Calendar on the same page.
But coordination! Oh, my. I don’t know whether it’s me and some oddness I’m creating, but when I have iCal, Plaxo and Google Calendar trying to coordinate with each other, I frequently end up with multiple instances of the same event in my calendar.
My kingdom for a calendar solution that syncs everywhere, is social and doesn’t make a mess!
Steve, I thought that Spanning Sync was going to be the solution to, via Google Calendar as a bridge, allow me to sync my wife’s iCal with mine - the problem is that with two machines it becomes Spamming Sync adding multiple calendar entries on top of multiple calendar entries. One example, yesterday I removed 23000 + birthday entries from Julianne’s iCal yesterday - Plaxo as a bridge is looking more possible. I’ve been thinking of blogging this experience, headline: Spanning Sync: Just Say No!
At least it’s not just me…