For posterity only Frank (sorry to clutter your space), Plaxo may be useful to some. From my view it remains a non-event. Irrelevant and not useful. That’s a general consensus in my circles, but your mileage may vary. If you work at Plaxo, your mileage will vary certainly.

By policy, Plaxo remains persona no grata on the systems and networks I oversee. It would take some significant relevance in our real world for anyone to consider revisting.

And now I’ve finished my revisitation of old dead threads for the week.

Why is it that I only am hearing GOOD things about Plaxo FROM Plaxo or their workers/affiliates/etc…

The internet searching that I have done seems to turn up mostly negative things regarding Plaxo and other similar services but the only real good come DIRECTLY from the company itself?

Don’t get me wrong here, this is not an attack. Just a well educated person making an interesting observation.

I also find it interesting that “Ken Camp’s” post on February 2, 2024 03:21 AM indicates a fair willingness to show the “Evil Side” of plaxo to at least one person and makes no secret (thanks to his post), that he has “seen Plaxo used directly as the distribution tool for malicious stuff”, but after Plaxo’s employee posts his defense of the service, Ken then seems have changed his tune.
Whats the matter Ken? Afraid that Plaxos paid Blog sniffer will stick your name in a spam listing?

What Plaxo does is make it very easy for users to extend the “chain of trust” in their email by how information is shared. User education is key and it’s very easy for users to assume things are safe and secure on their own systems that are not. The issue is with end user security, awareness and education, not the Plaxo product in and of itself.

I personally discourage Plaxo for reasons of user knowledge and education. I see value in the idea, but in my real world of thousands of naive users, it has proven problematic more than once. It’s not my role to set the policy and I don’t even provide user level support. My focus is the network architecture.

The one valid criticism of Plaxo is that some of our users send update requests to people that they barely know. This is not good for anyone (including Plaxo) and we are trying our best to educate users on this issue. I would welcome any ideas on this topic. We have a ZERO TOLERANCE policy for spammers on our service.

Note that Plaxo offers a simple way for anyone to block update requests. So, if you don’t want people sending update requests to you, go to: http://www.plaxo.com/opt-out

There is no truth to rumors about Plaxo messages containing viruses — this is patently false. People should be more careful before making damaging comments like this.

I would love to hear Mr. Camp’s “supporting background on the evil side of that equation…”

So, while there is a vocal minority that enjoys the conspiracy theories about Plaxo, we have a vibrant community of 5M users that use the service responsibly and appreciate its value. And, we are dedicated to constantly improving the service for both members and non-members.

Rikk Carey
Plaxo, Inc.
rikk@plaxo.com