Comments on: Plaxo Launches Pulse Widget

By: Prolegomena » Blog Archive » Wednesday 2.0

Prolegomena » Blog Archive » Wednesday 2.0 — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 12:03:24 +0000

[...] use Plaxo (as I do) to update your contact information in your address books, they’ve just integrated their social networking software, Pulse, into the [...]

By: Former Plaxo user

Former Plaxo user — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 22:43:30 +0000

it’s too bad that Plaxo didn’t learn the lesson from Facebook and give users the ability to turn this feature off if you want privacy. The way Pulse is configured, every one of your Plaxo contacts sees all your other activity. Nice! The party photos I uploaded for my friends also get sent to my co-workers and there is no way to prevent it.

By: TH

TH — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 22:05:05 +0000

EH - and that’s just it, Plaxo is now branded as a “spammer” from all those “Jane Dunn has just updated her contact information click to see details” emails of a couple of years ago. Plaxo is a tough sell for me forever because of that perception they created as the spam engine a couple years back.

By: EH

EH — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 22:23:53 +0000

What’s the over/under on Plaxo using this to spam the universe?

“{friend} wants you to know you may already have won a Plaxo profile!”

By: kayvaan

kayvaan — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 21:53:31 +0000

am i the only one that doesn’t see the referenced Plaxo widget anywhere on the post?

By: Derek Anderson

Derek Anderson — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 14:45:30 +0000

I am glad to see a working widget in a TC post. Even if the service is new and buggy.
I have been putting live widgets in my posts for a year and I know how much resources they take on any site. But it is a great way to show off what a widget can do without needing to actually go and register and set up the whole thing.

By: Steve Ballmer

Steve Ballmer — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 13:21:35 +0000

The social stuff is a FAD!

http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

By: Judi Sohn

Judi Sohn — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:01:46 +0000

I canceled my Plaxo account a few days ago, after years as a Premium member.

It was great when the focus was keeping my contact lists in sync. The new Plaxo interface is dog slow and the new connectors have been very buggy. On top of that, all the innovation and attention has been in Pulse, which doesn’t offer me anything that I either want or need.

I had contacts in my Plaxo address book because I needed to, um I don’t know…contact them?!? I don’t need Plaxo turn my contacts into a social network. There are other sites that do a much better job of that. So Plaxo went from doing a few things really well to doing a whole bunch of things, none of which are well done. No thanks.

By: Marc Nobel

Marc Nobel — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 09:02:38 +0000

So basically, It’s a lifestream widget… I guess people enjoy reinventing the wheel over and over again.

By: John Ward

John Ward — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 08:55:06 +0000

“What does Plaxo mean to you?”

RYK,

I have a couple of initial reactions. First, what does “Classmates” mean to you? They’ve had crossover success connecting military and previous working friends, despite having a name that boxes them into a corner.

Second, since Plaxo’s partnership with AOL, it has been sitting on the edge of social networking for a while. Pulse seems like a natural next step.

That said, I agree with your general sentiment.

By: RYK

RYK — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 07:12:39 +0000

This is an off topic question.

What does Plaxo mean to you?

To me it used to mean business address book. I find it hard to use Plaxo as a social network.

By: Robert Sanzalone

Robert Sanzalone — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 06:23:05 +0000

Dan, would LOVE your utility to work but yes, it died and I have about 500 contacts.

Still checking out this Plaxo widget. Deciding which way to go when lifestreaming… everything within Twitter or an external widget (like this Plaxo) to cover everything.

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 05:22:00 +0000

Is this really needed though? At least for me, I think it would benefit me much to have to aggregation on top of aggregation…

By: Dan Birdwhistell

Dan Birdwhistell — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 05:21:22 +0000

Grumph — nevermind re: the above —> looks like our server wigs out when someone with 1000+ friends tries to do a data dump. Mike feel free to delete all of these OT things. We’ll hack on it some more.

By: Dan Birdwhistell

Dan Birdwhistell — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 05:03:09 +0000

This is OT and definitely spam, but I just wanted to get this out there given how much talk there has been about Facebook’s walled garden.

Earlier tonight we launched a very simple app that allows users to do a massive data dump of content from their friends’ profiles. We’ve sifted through the ToS, Privacy Policy, and Developer Docs, but there’s nothing that would prevent us from doing this. Despite this, it still feels slightly “icky”. We built this app as a personal utility (it’s so much easier to work with these data in a spreadsheet), but also to kind of test the comfort levels re: sucking data out of Facebook.

Feel free to play around with it: http://www.facebook.com/apps/a.....6751187779