I awoke this morning to find out that my friend Robert Scoble had been banned from Facebook for alpha testing a Plaxo feature that allows you to take your contact list from Facebook and import it to Plaxo Pulse.
All day long I have been arguing on his behalf for data portability. I don’t like it that I can’t move my contacts or have my data from Facebook. But when he disclosed it was a feature from Plaxo, I freaked out.
Plaxo spams me constantly. I use it for my address book, and it functions very well for that. However, I volunteered to test Pulse early on, because I was in Silicon Valley for the summer, and that has produced an incredible amount of both spam and bacn.
For every person who tries to connect to me on Pulse that I know, there are twelve I’ve never met, who represent companies like "Integrity Income" and "Wealth Connections." These mega-networkers have no idea who I am, but they want to add my connections to theirs, producing an even larger network of spammers.
This summer I asked Plaxo if they would be introducing a feature that would allow a "group ignore" of all the people you didn’t want to connect to, and a group "connect" for all the ones you do, and Joseph Smarr said yes. But it isn’t there yet. So I have to spend a fair amount of time culling from the fifteen connection requests the two I actually know. It’s a time suck.
Nevertheless, I want data portability, and I admire Scoble for taking the heat. I will now stop writing and watch he video he’s going to make answering questions.
