Sometimes things change, and it’s hard to stay on top of them. Plaxo is supposed to help with this — an Outlook plug-in (i.e. a little piece of software that attaches itself to Outlook) which will update your contacts with other Plaxo users you know, and vice versa. Nice idea, and on the whole they did a good job of executing it. But now things are changing in PlaxoLand, and I’m not sure I’m on top of them anymore.
There are privacy issues: who exactly gets to see your data? And then there’s the money issue: how is Plaxo going to make money out of it? These sort of things worry folk: David Coursey, a columnist like myself but with more readers, trashes Plaxo, as does Mike in his excellent TechDirt blog. Plaxo was fine when people you knew added themselves and shared their info, but what happens, as Mike points out, when complete strangers do it?
I started to get peeved when I noticed that insurance salesmen started adding their contacts to my Plaxo setup. Surely that couldn’t happen? I thought folk needed permission to do that? I asked Plaxo about this a few weeks back and was told: “If you are a Plaxo user and someone sends you a Plaxo card, there is a link in the notification to add them to your address book. They are only added if you explicitly click on this link.” But I’m not sure that’s true. I’m a journalist so I’ve got a lot of people in my address book I couldn’t identify in a police line-up, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t let some of this pondlife into my Outlook.
Bottom line: Plaxo need to address this and other issues before folk believe them. Sure, 800,000 people are using it in over 200 countries (how many countries are there? I thought it wasn’t much more than that) but they’ll leave in droves if they feel their privacy is being compromised.