Plaxo this
I’m rooting for Michael Arrington and Rick Segal in their sneering at Plaxo. I have a very simple and concrete rule: I never but never respond to any Plaxo request. I also get irritated that new contact information for the person who spams me is not front-and-center; half the time, I have no idea who these people are who are bugging me. So please, don’t bug me with Plaxo.
I’m not much happier about Linked-In and find it particularly irksome when people spamming their address book can’t be bothered even to type in their own message — who do they think they are, the Parents Television Council? I think it’s particularly nervy of people I’ve never met to ask me to declare them friends and I have yet to find a single worthwhile contact out of Linked-In, but I will at least throw a link to people I actually have done business with. But in both cases, I have the gnawing fear that I’m thrown into a transaction that neither player truly controls.
Tags: Internet
January 15th, 2006 at 10:19 pm
I actually use Plaxo, but not for contact updating. What I like is that Plaxo synchronizes my Outlook contacts & calendar between my work and home computers. Really saves time for those of us who need to have access to our work info everywhere.
As for the contact updating, it’s a good idea, in theory. I have hundreds of business contacts and no easy way to know if they have changed their information. Plaxo offers a way to automate this task for a very large contact list. It’s not spam, since I can personally choose who gets the update requests, and I can write the message myself.
However, I only did the contact updating once, when I first installed Plaxo. I got one or two negative reactions, so I haven’t done it again. It’s a lot more work for me to manually update my lists, but if people aren’t comfortable any other way, so be it. If anybody knows of a more acceptable way to do automated contact updating, please share.
January 16th, 2006 at 10:43 am
The interesting question here is whether to blame the technology or the way people use it. The rail against Plaxo itself seems to imply that the way the technology is set up encourages people to use it in an annoying, spam-like way — although Plaxo has clearly made themselves a target in the way they have responded so defensively.
But to take all the frustration out on the technology itself seems analogous to blaming gun violence on the gun itself, rather than on those who allow guns to get into the hands of the wrong people (either through distribution or opposition to any kind of controls) — and then of course those who fire guns at other people.
Perhaps the Plaxo platform is a loaded gun (and thereby inherently a dangerous thing), and perhaps it was irresponsibly designed by its creators. But more of the blame would seem to lie with the way people use it — which is what Jeff gets at in his complaint about the way people send out their address book without a personal message.
January 16th, 2006 at 7:04 pm
I’m with you, Jeff — and Scott. And I think Scott has a good point — which dovetails with an excuse people give for another pet peeve of mine: Loud cell phone use in public places. People wrongly blame technology for this. I, too, have the technology, but I also have manners to go with it. This means, just for starters, when I go in ANY public place, I put my celll on vibrate, as it would be an imposition, and rude, for me to interrupt your thoughts with the BRING-BRING! of my phone.
PS more than I hate Plaxo mail (which I don’t answer either), I loathe e-vites (or anything that requires more of me than opening an e-mail to get the person’s message). Getting one doesn’t make me want to go to a party, but it does make me want to track down and throttle the person who sent it.
January 17th, 2006 at 12:46 pm
I HATE Plaxo, the idea of the thing creeps me out to no end, and I refuse to have anything to do with it. For the same reasons I don’t use Google Desktop, I’ll be damned if I let some corporate entity get any more data of mine than they already have.
January 20th, 2006 at 3:16 am
At LinkedIn, we guide our users to only invite people they know and trust, and we wrap invitations with a message to only accept invitations to connect from people you know and trust. 99.99% of our users are remarkably good at following these instructions, but a few hundred seem to think that sending invitations is a good way to introduce yourself to someone . . . and despite their small number they make their presence known as they are such prolific inviters.
We already provide some pretty fine control on the recipient side. On every invitation, there is a link where you can “change they way you receive invitations.” This allows you to specify who you want to receive invitations from and the rest land in a “blocked invitations” list that you can peruse every once in a while to make sure you didn’t miss someone with whom you did want to connect.
When responding to invitations, we provide also a “report” option along with “accept”, “decline” and the ever-popular “decide later.” Per our user agreement, it is not enough that the inviter knows you, but you have to know them back (suprisingly, that’s not always the same–especially for reporters, VC and recruiters). If you don’t, we encourage you to report the user, and we follow up with users who get flagged to us as potentially misusing the invitation system. We often restrict accounts and sometimes close accounts of violators.
We are also about to institute a lifetime limit on the number of invitations people can send. People who hit the limit can get it raised, but only if the feedback of their invitees has been positive (based on acceptance rates, complaint rates, etc.). We believe that just knowing that such a limit exists will make people much more judicious of who they invite, and hopefully, everyone else has a better experience even if they don’t auto-block invitations from people they don’t know.