Better Wording of My Point

I'd never heard of Judi Sohn before today, but I really like what she has to say about the Scoble/Plaxo thing.  She wrote four days ago what I wrote last night, only she did a better job.  I didn't read much about this before so I missed her post.  Being out of the loop for so long drives me nuts.  Check out what she has to say, though, because it's right in line with my thoughts.

Who Owns Your Email Address?

For the last month or so, I've been pretty out of the loop in terms of news, both online and off.  I normally read a few hundred articles a day, but during this time I read maybe a dozen total.  The holidays just kept me pretty busy, and I didn't have much time to read my feeds.  That being said, I'm a little late to the party on this particular piece of info.  Robert Scoble decided to test out a utility from Plaxo that would basically screen scrape information from his Facebook friends list and put it in a Plaxo database.  If you're familiar with the Facebook ToS, you already know what happened next.  That's right, Scoble got his account taken away.  After raising a big fuss online for a few days, he eventually got his account back.  I was completely unaware of any of this until today.  Had I found out earlier, I probably wouldn't have waited so long to unfriend him on Facebook.  I try to limit myself to not friending the "celebrity" type people on there, but I did have him, Leo Laporte, and Amber MacArthur.  Now I just have the latter two.  I had contemplated removing him earlier, but decided against it, as it was fun to see his updates.  After this, though, he's off my list. 

That isn't really what I'm writing about, though, as who I have on my friends list doesn't really matter.  What I find interesting is the debate about owning your social graph, and an open system that you can move that information around freely.  I am a bit split on this.  First, I agree that if I want to use a certain system for all of my contact management, I should be able to conveniently get that data from one thing to another.  However, is that data really mine to do that with?  Do I own my friends' contact info?  If they upload their information into Facebook, that doesn't suddenly make it my information.  Their information is still their information.  Does that mean that I should somehow be restricted on how I store this?  No, not at all.  But don't confuse the fact that you can find my email with the notion that you own that piece of data.  On that note, you aren't restricted on where you can keep my info once you have it, but I still have a choice of where I put it.  Keeping my email in your Outlook address book and keeping my email in your Plaxo account are two very different things.  One is only an address book, the other is significantly more.  If I wanted my information in the Plaxo network, I would have put it there myself.  The same can be said for the concept of social networks.  I am a member of Facebook, and I put all my information in there with the intention of it only appearing in Facebook.  I don't want my information in some other social network.  If you want to use some new startup network as your social network of choice, go right ahead, just don't expect me to join you.  Furthermore, don't stick my information there either.  I want to put my information in a network and have it stay there.  Sure, there's nothing stopping you from writing all my info down and then re-typing it into so other system, but I'm working on the assumption that you will be reasonable enough to not go sticking it in every social network out there.

Remember the fiasco that was Quechup?  A new network came along, asked you to upload your friends' contact info, and them spammed them like crazy.  That's a bit how Plaxo used to be.  Once they had your info, it was spam central.  I would really rather not risk having this happen all the time.  I know that we should be embracing the freedom of data portability, but let's not forget that not all of us want our data to be portable.  Just because we put it in Facebook doesn't mean we want it outside of Facebook.  And like I said, I know that it can be done manually, but that manual effort is exactly enough to keep most people from bothering.  If it's so easy to do manually, why do people want portability?  I'm uploading info with the assumption that it'll stay where I put it. 

I don't think that I'm being too unreasonable here, but if you disagree, please let me know.  Dare seems to agree with me, so I know I'm not completely nuts.

What's a Plaxo?

A friend of mine got an invite from someone on Plaxo to use it, and he asked me what the heck Plaxo was. I responded with way more than what he probably wanted, so I figured I'd post it since I've been so absent lately.

Plaxo made a name for themselves years ago (I think it was like early 2000's) as being a contact management thingy. Problem is, they made a bigger name for themselves as being spammers. See, they had all these people's contact information since their idiot friends put them into the system. So tons of people got bombarded with spam (if I recall, it wasn't necessarily evil spam, I think it was just a barrage of sign-up now things from Plaxo, but spam none the less).

Fast forward to today. They've claimed to have changed their ways(and I'm fairly certain they're under new management, so it's possible), and from what I've been reading about them, they do seem to be on the up and up now. However, the same can be said about Real.They pissed everyone off, and have since corrected their errors. At the same time, you won't see me downloading Real Player.

Now, after quitting with the slimy tactics and going legit, Plaxo boasts something like 12 million users or so. With this large user base, and the current "hotness" of Facebook and social networks,Plaxo has launched its own. They figure that you're already using them to manage your contacts, why not include photos, news, and whatever else too. It doesn't seem like a completely horrible idea,as they pretty much went from 0 to 12 million users of its social network overnight. Whether or not it'll actually go anywhere, I don't know, but I don't think that they're going away anytime soon.

All that said, personally, I wouldn't go near them with a 10-foot pole. I'm not one to easily find forgiveness, and their past transgressions pissed me off quite a bit as I was one of the many that got pounded with invitations to join. So I'd go ahead and stay back,and just watch rather than actually joining in. I don't think many of you need any additional help managing your contacts, as there are plenty of alternatives out there that you're already using if you needed help there.