My Palm Treo is on is on its last legs, so as I've been waiting for the new iPhone to come out, I've been trying to figure out how I'll export my Palm address book and use the native Apple Calendar, To-Do lists, and other applications. At the same time, I've also been trying to figure out how a bunch of social networking technologies work together (or not), and which ones I'll use. This post is about what I've learned so far.

The native Mac personal productivity tools have deficiencies, and I only hope that Apple addresses these in the near future. For example, "To-Do" lists don't have categories. If you want to categorize your to-do lists, you have to create a different calendar. This quickly becomes unwieldy.

Palm has allowed up to 20 categories in its To-Do lists since about 1998. Why doesn't Apple? I really like the approach that "Things" software does to solve this problem. It lets you tag your action items on the fly, much like you can with iPhoto.

Here's a problem with the Calendar: if you want to share it, you can only do so via the .Mac service, which Apple is going to rename "MobileMe."  I'll have to wait and see what they fix  MobileMe, but with its predecessor .mac, you could use groups in address book and you couldn't edit your calendar via a plain old brwoser.

At the same time that I've been preparing to convert my phone, I've also been trying to figure out how I should use Plaxo, LinkedIn and Facebook. I've become a convert to the benefit of social networking as a way to connect with friends and colleagues I don't necessarily see all the time. After all, my old-fashioned Christmas card list inevitably loses one or two people every year.

Of course, these sites aren't really new. LinkedIn has been around since 2002. Had I understood the idea, I would have "linked in" all my Sun colleagues a long time ago. As they moved to other companies, I could have more easily stayed connected to them. But I was afraid of being endlessly hounded by people looking for jobs or trying to sell me something, so I didn't connect to LinkedIn until very recently.

Plaxo, for me, was in the same boat as LinkedIn. I joined a long time ago, but I didn't like being bugged by members of my network to update my business card, so I didn't add to it.

In the process of trying to figure out how to overcome the limitations of my Mac, I stumbled upon Plaxo again and discovered its great little Mac Address Book add-on. The problem with Plaxo, though, is that it forces you to create yet another social network in order to access a contact's business card. The last thing I wanted to do is create a third network on top of my LinkedIn and Facebook networks.

So I played around with LinkedIn. Since it has the capability to import and export addresses, I wanted to see if I could use it instead of Plaxo, eliminating the need to create yet another social network in my life. I knew that there was a widget that connected LinkedIn with Facebook. I wanted to see if I could manage my address book in Linked in.

The answer was no. LinkedIn doesn't export contact information beyond a name and email address. But I wanted the phone numbers, since the phone was the catalyst for this whole investigation in the first place.

So here's how I've decided to use these technologies.

1. Use Plaxo. After linking to someone else, you can get access to their contact information. I can then sync it to my Mac's Address Book and get it on my (future) iPhone. Plaxo also lets me view and edit my calendar, to-do liast and address book for free, via any client Web browser. (I don't have to pay that .Mac extortion fee!)

I paid for a Plaxo premium membership to test the Plaxo and LinkedIn sync. The problem is that it hasn't been available, even though they advertise that it is. When I called "premium support," they told me that there were technical problems and that the service would be available any day. That was about a month ago, and it's still not available, so I canceled my premium service.

However, I did like the de-duping feature of the Plaxo premium service. It did a much better job than the native Apple apps.

2. Use LinkedIn or Facebook, or both, based on personal preference. LinkedIn contacts can be imported into Facebook through a widget, but it's still kind of clumsy. And Facebook hasn't returned the favor to LinkedIn.