I started using Plaxo years ago as a mechanism to “safeguard” my contacts. In the marketing field, my network (“rolodex”) is one of my more important assets, so having an online service to help me migrate the database from computer to computer is wonderful. I think this is now my 5th or 6th laptop owned since originally signing up to Plaxo, and each migration has gone fairly smoothly. Even to my Sony Vaio SZ-VGN460N, the worst computer I have ever owned in my life.
Now there’s always been a little rivalry of sorts with LinkedIn, even though they both have distinct value propositions (Plaxo being slightly more useful in my eyes). But with rapid onslaught of Facebook in the post-collegiate world this year, it seems like everybody even tangentially related to the social networking space is either jumping on board with a Facebook App (shameless plug – rate Facebook applications here!!!) or trying to compete with a similar styled offering.
Unfortunately, from all outward appearances, Plaxo is taking the “slightly more evil” route of diong business. Plaxo seems to be going down the route of near-invasion of privacy combined with phishing-style email updates. Today I received an email entitled “What’s happening in your Pulse”:
As you can see from the screenshot, I have a few updates from some colleagues. Now first off, I never asked for said updates, which puts this into the spam category of email. Secondly, I am pretty sure nobody on the list has opted in to having Plaxo track and share this information with me, which is a privacy invasion (yes, I know that these are all publicly accessible things, but without the opt-in, it’s dubious). Thirdly, it is absolutely ridiculous that these aren’t active links to the activity updates! I’m supposed to go to Plaxo Pulse just to get the links I want.
In my eyes, this is a shameful betrayal of users on Plaxo’s part. They have created a “service” designed without any consent on anyone’s behalf. In doing so, they have most certainly lost me as an evangelist, and have opened the door for any competitor with a similar offering to rapidly snatch me up. What a terrible business, product, and marketing decision they have made. I wonder how many people it took to make it?
I can’t speak about each and every one of the folks on that list, but I am connected to most of them in Pulse. I am receiving the content they have chosen to share via Pulse. And, while we enable granular control of sharing (family, friends, business network), several of the folks on your list have chosen “public” as their sharing setting, which allows us to deliver their content to other Plaxo members who have them in their address book.
Pulse is a very young service, so we’re fine-tuning the various features. We appreciate your feedback.
John, thanks for the reply. Can you tell me when exactly *I* chose to share via Pulse and when I subscribed to an email with updates from my network?
Also, why aren’t the updates in the email active links so I can just go straight to the items I want? That would be a lot more useful to me as a user.
Again – I am thrilled you responded – I have been a long-time Plaxo fan, and really want to see you doing “good”!
Hey, Jeremy. Happy to clear up confusion.
At this point you may not have chosen to share via Pulse. However, you’ve probably as a Plaxo member received e-mails from time-to-time letting you know about contact info changes that happened. The e-mail you just received is a new version of those e-mails, presenting changes in the form of a weekly digest. The hope is to cut down on the number of e-mails users receive by combining into a single weekly digest. (If you hadn’t been receiving such one-off e-mails before, then it would have been a bug that caused you to start getting this type of e-mail.)
As to the particular design, it is intended to give you a sense of the various updates that are awaiting in Pulse, in case you are interested. If you are not interested, you can either ignore it (or opt-out of such weekly digests in the future.)
I should probably add that I really appreciate hearing your reactions. Pulse is only a few weeks old, and like any social application, we can’t always guess how people will react to its particular mix of features. My goal is to make sure we listen well, and communicate clearly. Feel free to drop me a line any time. I’m john at plaxo dot com. (I head up marketing and am very involved in our push to open up the social web.)
I’m so dismayed with Plaxo just now. I feel like they have crapped up a really good product and given into greed.
I know their flaks are trying spin this thing down, but the impact continues. My connections get to know what I’m doing with my contact list and they also get to know what my other connections are doing.
This is just shocking to me…I have deleted all my connections and feel much better now