Tag: plaxo

social networks

Does Plaxo flood your inbox with connection requests?

Plaxo started life as a place to hold your contact information online.

That was quite handy and they allowed synchronising from your Mac or PC so your contact data were always held safe in the cloud.

More recently Plaxo added a feature called Pulse. Pulse allows you to tell it where you publish photos, blog posts, bookmarks etc. and it creates a lifestream, a la Facebook which it publishes to your Pulse network.

All sounds nice, right?

Sure, however, for some reason, and I don’t know why, of all the social networks I have joined (and I have joined a few!) Pulse seems to generate the most emails. The emails typically have the subject line “[someone I have never heard of] has added you as a business connection”

On Facebook and Xing, the other two social networks I frequent most, I occasionally get connection requests from people I don’t know. But not very often, and usually a bit of digging will show how they are connected to me.

However, on Plaxo I get waaay too many of these business connections and I have no idea where they are coming from.

Is this just me or are others finding Plaxo also generates too many connection requests from strangers?

google, social networks

OpenSocial signs up MySpace and SixApart too!

I mentioned earlier in the week that Google was about to launch OpenSocial, a Social Network API platform. Since then Mike Arrington in TechCrunch is reporting that not only is it happenning but MySpace, Bebo and SixApart are on board too!

The OpenSocial site is now live and confirmed participants so far are:

Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING

Why OpenSocial?

The web is more interesting when you can build apps that easily interact with your friends and colleagues. But with the trend towards more social applications also comes a growing list of site-specific APIs that developers must learn.

OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.

Many sites, one API

Whither FaceBook, the current social network colossus in this? They and Microsoft (their recent investor) have got to be wondering how to meet this challenge to their dominant position. Probably the best approach would be to jump in too – that way they have all the advantages of the open platform without the development costs. Google are saying it is an open platform and they wouldn’t see that one coming!

The chances are though that they won’t jump on board and there will be two social network standards, Google’s OpenSocial standard and FaceBook’s.

Web 2.0

Plaxo – good idea, poorly executed?

I have a Plaxo account. I set it up last year to try it out. It seemed like a good idea, an online address book where I could store all my contacts info and have those data available whereever I had an Internet connection.

The reality though is a little different.

When I set up my account I followed the instructions for importing my contact info from my Mac Address Book. The import failed. I tried again several months later. Same result. I didn’t try any more after that.

A contacts db with no contact data is useless and I wasn’t about to invest time in manually entering the hundreds of contacts I have into Plaxo one by one.

I get the occasional email from Plaxo telling me that someone else has added my details to Plaxo and that I can now add their details to my account. I worry about the amount of emails Plaxo sends out – it must get annoying for some people to be constantly receiving update requests.

I received such an email this morning so I logged into Plaxo for the first time in months only to be amazed at how slow it now runs. It was like swimming through treacle!

It is a shame really – I like the idea but the execution, in this case is very poor.