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Most of you who know me know that I’m a big LinkedIn guy. However, lately they have had a big change-up in leadership, they continually are taking away features, and randomly crack down on people’s accounts.

With no communication telling us what’s up or what direction that they’re going in, it’s made myself and a lot of folks that I know start at least looking around at alternatives. We aren’t completely giving up on LinkedIn, but when Burgermeister Meisterburger takes over a community, the abolishment of fun isn’t far behind…

Enter the newly expanded Plaxo.

I’m starting to like Plaxo more and more. And with the introduction of Pulse (their beta social networking piece), it seems like a good site to at least back up your (social) network.

Despite some serious mistakes with this service, they’re doing some things very right and I think it could prove to be very useful to all you social networkers (especially my friends on LinkedIn!).

NOTE: I know this seems like a paid review, but it’s not. I just got carried away with doing a complete review. Plaxo probably ought to pay me - which I’m open to, of course - but they haven’t as of yet.

PLAXO PULSE - BACKING UP YOUR SOCIAL NETWORK

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Plaxo, it started life as a way to exchange virtual business cards. You would set up a “personal” card and a “business” card and you could send either or both to anyone who has an e-mail address.

Ho-hum, right? Another “address book on the web”.

I used to think the same thing. But they’ve added so much functionality to it as part of their introduction of Pulse that it’s quite a bit more now.

In fact, Plaxo has become a very good place to backup your social networks, to create an always-accessible centralized address book, and to coordinate all of your online presence.

THE GOOD PARTS OF PLAXO / PULSE

There is so much to see out at Plaxo these days, that I just have to list all of the things that they’ve done right. And there are a bunch of ‘em!

• Info Belongs To You - On some social networks, you get to see what your contact has put into the system. While that is useful, what if you have a personal, private e-mail address that you want to remember?

    At Plaxo, the information in your Address Book starts with what the contact has entered, but belongs to you. As a result, you can change any piece of information with more updated, more personal, or more private information that you may have.

    For those of us who have LinkedIn contacts who haven’t updated their e-mail addresses, this is a big plus!

• Categories That They Choose - Whenever you’re accepting a connection or adding additional people into your Address Book or Pulse network, the system asks whether this person is a Business Contact, a Friend, or Family.

    Just these simple designations make it easy to sort people with how you know them, a feature many social networking sites are missing.

• Categories That I Choose - Additionally, I can add my own (multiple) categories to each contact. So, if I have a list of blog-owners, for instance, I can categorize them as “blogger”. But, since I can add multiple categories, I can also tag one of the “blogger”s as a “car guy”, “ballerina”, “web 2.0″, “lumberjack”, and anything else I can think of.

    As far as I can tell, there’s no limit to the number of categories that you can add someone to. And the great thing is that I can sort my Address Book into these categories from one drop-down list.

    The only bug with this feature is that once you categorize someone, you can never again have them in no category. You can replace all of the categories, but they have to be replaced with at least one category or it’ll ignore the changes.

• Customizable Notes For Each Contact - Another great feature is that you can add notes to each of your contacts. This is huge for anyone who has a large number of contacts in their lives. Track spouses, kids, your last contact, or whatever.

    All social networks that are serious about being for networking should have this, but most don’t.

• Easy (But It’ll Cost You) Sync With LinkedIn - You have to have an upgraded ($50/yr) Plaxo membership, but you can quickly and easily import your entire LinkedIn contact list AND it won’t send any e-mails to them (unlike MANY social networks).

    I told it to sync up with my LinkedIn address book and it checked, said, “This will take more than a couple minutes, so we’ll do it in the background”, and when I checked on it 10 minutes later, it was done. As the commercials say, “It’s just that easy!”

    While the data that is brought over is limited (name, e-mail, title, company), if any of your contacts are also Plaxo members, it’ll automatically provide their full Plaxo contact information.

• Getting Notes From Other Users - It’s a small thing, but the service is even excited about notes you get from other users. They go something like this: “[contact] sent you a message. It’s probably awesome. Read it here: http://pulse.plaxo.com/pulse/messages/”

    Of course, the only downside to this is that the notes often aren’t awesome.

• Easy (And Limitless) Sharing Option - Share messages, URLs, and videos with everyone or just some categories. This will appear in your contacts’ Pulse area of the site for them to see automatically.

    And, if what you’re sharing is really important, you can optionally select to e-mail your contacts about it by just checking a checkbox.

• The Ability To Comment (Blog-Like) On Other People’s Updates - When you see that your contact has recently updated their information to be the “VP of Ruling the World”, you can just click a “comment” link next to the update and send your congratulations.

    These comments are just like a blog in that they’re visible to everyone and you can see how many comments any update has.

• The Ability To Add All Of The Feeds That Make Sense To You - To make it easy for your Plaxo profile to be the central location for all of your online presence, they have an area where you can tell people about whatever online accounts you want them to know about.

    While you can’t put in a link to everything in the world, they do have pre-defined links for your blog’s RSS feed, Flickr (which I can’t turn off), Amazon Wishlist, AOL Pictures, Del.icio.us bookmarks, Digg, Google Reader, ImageShack, Jaiku, Last.fm, LiveJournal, MySpace, Picassa, Pownce, SmugMug, TravelPod, Tumblr, Twitter, WebShots, Windows LiveSpaces, Xanga, Yahoo 360, Yelp, and YouTube.

    That should be enough to give people a good idea about who you are, no?

• Share your information with those whom you choose. - Both on a macro level (share your information with everyone, your contacts, or just specific individuals) and on a micro level (for each contact you can select share business OR home OR both information), you can specifically select what information to share.

    This allows you to make one spot for both your business and your personal contacts without seeming overly informal or formal for the wrong audience.

• Add Old E-Mail Addresses - Why would you want to add old e-mail addresses that don’t work any more? So that old friends, who only have the old e-mail address to work from, can find you now.

    I thought this was one of those obvious great ideas that nobody else has even thought of.

• Calendar Sync - You can sync your calendar with a lot of different local or web-based calendars. So, whether your calendar is on Google, Yahoo, Outlook / Outlook Express, or anywhere else that uses an iCal file, you can import your data.

    Then, once imported, you can either merge them all onto one Plaxo calendar or keep each one separate.

• No LinkedIn-Like Restrictions, Rules, Penalties, Unwritten Rules, etc. - LinkedIn (and several other social communities) have adopted odd and quickly-changing rules as a result of their rapid growth. The problem is that they don’t announce the rules or the changes so it just seems like a drunk dictator enforcing new rules at random.

    Plaxo has none of that. At least, for now.

• Mobile Access To Everything - By going to m.plaxo.com on your cell phone, you can have complete access to your contact list, your to-do list, and your calendar.

    No mre being without any of your contacts anywhere. Social networkers like myself have been waiting for a feature like this for a long time!

Whew! That’s a lot of stuff that they’re doing right! So, how could there be anything that they’re doing wrong?

I’m glad you asked…

THE PARTS OF PLAXO / PULSE THAT NEED IMPROVEMENT

As with any new service, there are parts that are confusing, not well-thought-out, or just plain dumb. I’m sure that they’ll correct all of these, but in the meantime, here are the pieces of the Plaxo / Pulse services that need improvement:

• Pulse Concept Is Separate There’s a confusing “firewall” between the address book and “connections” sections that is a little off. You see, the Pulse area isn’t fully integrated with your address book.

    Often you can’t see much of any of the user’s information in the Pulse area.
  Even if you’re not going to list all of the info in the Pulse tab, how about a simple link to the Address Book area so that you can see everything about your contact. Or, given that this is how the service started, why not display their card?

• Little Information To Make A Connection Decision When you get a Pulse invitation, it just says, “How do you know [NAME]?” so that you can categorize it (as business, personal, and/or family).

    It doesn’t present their contact information or their contact card to you to jog your memory. Just a name. I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember everybody’s name whom I’ve met immediately.

• Sharing based only on their categories - When you choose what information you want to share with whom, you can only use Plaxo’s categories (Business, Friend, Family) and not your own.

    If I’m going to go through the trouble to enter a category for each of my contacts, why not let me share my information based on my own categories?

• Lack of an RSS Feed - Rather than forcing me to log into Plaxo (which I know is one of the main goals for them), why not create an RSS feed for all - or some - of my contacts’ update information?

    That way, just like with a blog, when I see something come across my reader that interests me (a friend has just gotten a promotion, for example), I can go out to Plaxo and act upon it. This not only makes extreme sense, but would take about 10 minutes to implement since Plaxo is already assembling a local feed of this data. Just put it in XML and - POOF! - you have an RSS feed.

• No Easy Export Option - Yes, you can sync your contacts with Outlook or Thunderbird or any number of other locations, which is nice. However, I started a Thunderbird sync (with around 2,000 contacts) over an hour ago and it’s still running.

    Why not just export my contacts (or just the ones that I select) into a simple comma-delimited .csv file? That way, I can do what I want with my contacts and don’t need to spend an hour (or two or three) to sync it somewhere?

  UPDATE: In the regular version of Plaxo, you can export to .csv easily. It’s just the beta site (where you do Pulse) that doesn’t have an easy link.

• Potential User Limits - With a free account, you can store 1,000 contacts. That much is clear. It’s unclear, however, if there is a maximum number of connections that you can have in Plaxo or Pulse Premium ($50/yr).

    All the promotional page says is “more than 1,000″. Does that mean 1,001? 10,001? I dunno. There doesn’t seem to be any way to find out. Which leads me to…

• No Help Available - I’ve been trained by cheap companies the world over to search for my own help information from KnowledgeBases, FAQs, and Forums. There is none of that with Plaxo.

    I sent a message to Plaxo support two days ago, but I have yet to get a response. I think they must use LinkedIn’s Customer Support team…

   UPDATE: It turns out that this is only the case in the “beta view”, which you have to use if you’re using Pulse. If you switch back to the original view, you can’t use Pulse, but you can use FAQs, help, etc. Still haven’t heard back from support, thought…

• Premium Free Trial - As with a lot of companies, to try the Premium service for 30 days, you’ve got to enter a credit card number. I did this as your intrepid reporter, but I probably would not have otherwise.

    Listen, guys…. If the service is any good AND if I have more than 1,000 contacts, then after 30 days, I’ll pay a measly $50 a year to maintain everything. Especially if I get an e-mail that says, “Your 30 day trial is up. If you wish to cancel Premium services, do nothing and we will delete all but 1,000 of your contacts by such-and-such a date…”

There are a number of things that need to be fixed, but given that they’ve just begun, things look pretty good for Plaxo.

So, if you’ve got a large network somewhere on a social network, this may be the best way to backup your network, but also maintain access to it anywhere.


Enjoy the Search!

Dan
—–
Daniel R. Sweet
Chief Cook-And-Bottle-Washer / Technical Recruiter
FRACAT.com - Free Resume and Career Toolbox
LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielrsweet
Call me on Jaxtr: http://www.jaxtr.com/fracat

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 10:42 am and is filed under Site Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.