plaxo

Feb 18 2009

My Social Network “Friend” Policy (Updated again)

Over the past few years I have joined several social networking sites and continue to use a few of them regularly. These sites serve different purposes for me and I have started to come up with strategies of whom to connect with where. Here are the general guidelines that I have developed (subject to spontaneous change and arbitrary override).

  1. On LinkedIn I only link with people that I know in person , worked with in real life or have worked with online intensively in different open source projects. , have communicated with over different media. there are couple of exceptions in my connections from my early days when I didn't have my own set of rules yet. (Some of them have been unlinked now actually)

    LinkedIn is my personal Addressbook, not a public Phone guide :)

  2. I only follow people who inform and/or entertain me on Twitter and I don't care about followers, so don't expect me to follow you back.
    (I`m not using Identi.ca anymore .. given no relevant userbase)
  3. On location based services (like Tripit, Dopplr ), I connect to people that I would genuinely like to meet up with when traveling and who I trust not to rob my house when I am away. If we haven't met yet, but you want to meet this is the place to connect !
    (Forget about Dopplr.. only Tripit for now..)
  4. Yes, I did Poken, but obviously only with people I meet in person, and I`m still waiting for that first Poken with someone I don't know yet. (I was close but ... :)) (Update: Poken is kinda obsolete, and my battery is s dead anyhow)
  5. Sadly I`m using Facebook again , I only connect to people I know, and I generally Ignore all group invites, and block all applications. I'd actually prefer not using it at all.
  6. I`m keeping an Eye on Google+ .. but I`m not seeing much action
  7. I'm so not Plaxo, Xing and Ecademy anymore, I sometimes log on there, once every 6 months hoping nobody was stupid enough to send me a message there ..
  8. To me Wink, Spock, Naymz and some others I forgot are Dead
  9. I join new social networks often with no intention of actually using them, but just to make sure Tom doesn't sign up impersonating me

Well, those are my rules and I’m stickin’ to ‘em… at least, for now and when I don’t forget them.

(Idea shamelessly copied from Seth :))

Dec 20 2007

Yasn

Paul, the reason why they are bothering you on Spock , is because they haven't remembered they signed up with Wink yet :)

Nov 29 2007

YASN, or how to overload the SMTP servers

Over the past couple of days there is an increased flow of traffic to my Inbox all fairly identical mails from people that I`m connected to on LinkedIn that somehow are being invited by their friends to also start using Plaxo.
I`m wondering if people don't realise they are resending their whole LinkedIn addressbook an invitation or if they do it on purpose. I`m still looking for the great new feature that Plaxo has that urges me to switch to it or even consider using it actively.
I haven't found it .. so please explain me why you are using plaxo

A couple of weeks ago I started this poll on my blog so people could vote on their social network site.
Guess what the conclusion was.. the majority of my readers favours LinkedIn, some like Facebook and only some individuals like Plaxo or Xing

Yes I create accounts on most new YASN (Yet Another Social Network) thingies, but merely as a form of Online Identity Protection. (It's pretty easy to find a new YASN and create an account there that you shouldn't be creating)

Now I`m all in favour of redundancy and high availability. But I frequently just export my LinkedIn connections to my local desktop and that gives me a nice backup.

So is this going to be the new trend ? I launch a new YASN and suddenly I create an avalanche of mails that will be send to other people. Geez.. this looks like a virus in LookOut
But how long wil our email system live if more and more people start using these tools and more and more new sites implement the feature. ? When will Inbox protection tools start with default filtersets for a list of Social Networks ?
Wil social networks start to figure out ways to evade Inbox protection tools ?

Maybe we just need to add some more meta information in our DNS servers. :)

Nov 04 2007

Plaxo , what's the use ?

I just got an invite to connect to an old collegue on Plaxo Pulse

I`ve been ignoring Plaxo for a while now as the only thing it did for me was keeping an online addressbook.
I already have an online addressbook it's called LinkedIn.

Upon accepting the invite Plaxo proposed me to import my contacts from both Facebook (which I don't even actively use) and LinkedIn . Now this is the first time an app proposed me to import my contacts from LinkedIn.. an API was announced but I haven't found it yet.

I browsed around on the new Plaxo Beta but honestly I can't say I found anything interresting on it so it'ss yet another passive social network account for me.

However it made me wonder if there are already drupal frameworks out there that let you use FaceBook or LinkedIn data. And I promptly ran into the Facebook one still pretty young. I couln't find a LinkedIn one yet however .. altough that one would interrest me more

Any takers ? :)