I was an early adopter of Plaxo – the contact sync and update tool. I managed to read the “update your address book” messages carefully enough to realize I needed to uncheck-all and avoid spamming my address book. Plaxo’s mistake was making spamming everyone you know the default choice and they got a bad reputation in the marketplace because of it.
Fast forward to a week or so ago and they launch Plaxo Pulse, their take on aggregated social networking services. The implementation is decent. They aggregate twenty-one different services currently and I’ve integrated six of them (Flickr, Last.fm, this blog, Pownce, Twitter, and Del.icio.us) so far. It looks and acts like something I might have built if I wasn’t already working on something great.
The problem is they want you to “friend” people all over again! My God, if you haven’t figured out who my friends are already looking into these services, you aren’t doing something right. And to make it worse, they are back to this nonsense.
You haven’t connected with very many people yet!
Connect with the people in your address book to get started.
Invite your friends
Send invites to the people you know so they they don’t miss out!
I’m going to level with you Plaxo. I’m not going to make you the center of my social universe. You might end up playing a useful part if you are able to successfully aggregate the things I do online, but Facebook is already way, way ahead of you here and I already have Facebook apps for *all* of the services you have synced with.
Side note: complaining about Facebook bankruptcy is bragging that too many people want to be your friend and you can’t possibly keep up with all the attention, e.g., OMG, too many people want to take me to prom. That’s fine, I’m sure it is a real problem for you (and hope to one day have this problem) but just understand a) how it sounds to everyone else b) that most users are thrilled by the relatively high level of interactivity and newness.