Plaxo
Sounds like a tooth condition. Someone whose judgment I trust sent the Plaxo bot skittering across the net to shake out my details for her address book. Okay. I filled in the card and signed up for Plaxo myself. I was a bit surprised when the free service gave me an immediate opportunity for an upgrade to the tune US$20 per year.
The Plaxo set-up is simplicity itself. All your Outlook email contacts get listed in this nice tidy list. So I look at the list and I realize that most of my peacenik friends are paranoid about stuff like this, so that leaves blogging friends, professional contacts, and a bunch of miscellaneous contacts, friends and family.
It’s not easy to check the little boxes when you should be bed because you have a fever of 102 degrees and your teeth are chattering and the next cough threatens to wipe out your screen in a haze of viral mist, but some things we do because we’d rather not be lying flat on our back wasting time. So, I left my home in Georgia and found myself sitting on the dock filling in little check boxes hallucinating Otis Redding in the background.
Not everyone feels real mellow about Plaxo. One of the awkward things to come out of this experience was spamming a professional contact list (Did I really put a check in that box? When are keyboarding and operating heavy equipment the same thing?) One of guys says the message I sent that came from Plaxo came with a Mydoom variant attached. A woman on the list pointed out that "friends don’t let friends drive Plaxo." Do you have any Plaxo stories you’d care to share?
The bad news is the list of links you get when you google "Plaxo is evil." I hadn’t thought to do this before I dove in headfirst. The good news is that, according to this comment on a post at Judith Meskill’s social software blog,
When you remove your account, all information associated with the account is also removed from our servers. This includes the address book information you were using Plaxo to help manage (ie: your contact information for friends, associates, etc…). Members can remove their account at anytime by going to: https://www.plaxo.com/delete_account and following the simple instructions.
Also: under full disclosure, even after removal, your account information may be stored within a backup or log file as part of normal system maintenance and backup. We maintain log files for 30 days. But your information still falls under the provisions of the Privacy Policy in place at time of collection. As you may already be aware, our privacy principles are:
- Your Information is your own and you decide who will have access to it.
- You maintain ownership rights to Your Information, even if there is a business transition or policy change.
- You may add, delete, or modify Your Information at any time.
- Plaxo will not update or modify Your Information without your permission.
- Plaxo will not sell, exchange, or otherwise share Your Information with third parties, unless required by law or in accordance with your instructions.
- Plaxo does not send spam, maintain spam mailing lists, or support the activities of spammers.These provisions and more are covered in our Plaxo Privacy Policy found at: http://www.plaxo.com/privacy/policy . If you have any further questions, please let me know. Thanks.
Stacy Martin
Plaxo Privacy Officer
privacy @t plaxo.com
And so to bed… at least one more day of this thing in front of me. Seems to have morphed from flu to bronchitis. Yuch…