What do you think of plaxo

Plaxo tends to bring on strong negative emotions in people. The reason so many people hate Plaxo? When you sign up for Plaxo, they make it misleadingly easy to spam your entire address book with your contact information and a Plaxo advertisement.

And any updates they do are likely to be sent to their entire address book as well. As millions of people unwittingly do this, we, the non Plaxo users, are hit with a massive aggregate cost: dealing with all of this spam. Part of the reason is that for Plaxo and others your e-mail address serves as a unique identifier — you may have several user names across several social networks but odds are your e-mail address is constant.

So when Plaxo pulls in your contacts' e-mail addresses from Facebook the best way to discover those people in Plaxo's own database is to search by e-mail. But obviously being a unique identifier is not the sole purpose of an e-mail address. In other words, yes your e-mail address is unique and identifies you, but it's also a way to contact you, which may not be what you want. The underlying thing that is wrong with an email address is that its affordance is backwards - it enables people who have it to send things to you, but there's no reliable way to know that a message is from you.

Conversely, URLs have the opposite default affordance - people can go look at them and see what you have said about yourself, and computers can go and visit them and discover other ways to interact with what you have published, or ask you permission for more.

Of course that's one of the ideas behind OpenID — create a single source for storing any identity information and control who sees what on per application Facebook, Plaxo, et al. As well, I can give services permission to share the URL-based identifiers of my friends on a per-instance basis without the threat of betraying their confidence since their public URLs don't reveal their sensitive contact information unless they choose to publish it themselves or provide access to it.

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