Making people and ideas findable
What's Up with Plaxo?
I guess I'm already a member of this site, who knows how many sites I belong to at this point!, so I go and approve our connection.
What I'm curious about is the sudden spike in activity, what's going on here? I sometimes get 2-3 connection emails a day. Reminds me of Linkedin of a few years ago, and I still get those pretty often. I consider Linkedin another waster of my time as well. This little site has proved far more valuable to me in the past couple months than all of my 2 years on Linkedin ever has.
My issue is, what good is any of this doing me? I don't use Outlook, a Mac user, so the plug in is worthless.
Sometimes I feel these sites are just networking for networking purposes driven by our mutual panic of being left out of the next cool thing.
So is anyone finding Plaxo useful? Anyone using it for reals?
Tags: communities, linkedin, plaxo, social
25 Comments
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Comment by Jenn Rarick on March 4, 2008 at 10:58am -
I agree. I'm social-networked out. I find LinkedIn useful for staying in touch with college classmates and friends in other markets (Denver, NY, Chicago, Boston). For me, it's more of an address book than a useful communication tool.
I enjoy the instant commenting aspect of Smaller Indiana, but I wish it were a more focused community—i.e. creative/marketing professionals. I don't need a new hairdresser, and I don't need help with bad credit (both solicitations I have received since joining). I've also been "friended" because of my photo…a creepy phenomenon I hoped to avoid on a professional site.
To answer your Plaxo question: I joined it, but never expect to use it. I felt rude declining the invitation (since I know the sender well). I find it more annoying than helpful…
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Comment by Scott Abel on March 4, 2008 at 11:01am - Plaxo is useful for me as an address book tool. But it's becoming increasingly irrelevant as more and more social networking tools include contact functionality, often hooking into existing systems like Linked In.
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Comment by Dave Fulton on March 4, 2008 at 11:05am - We all have only so many hours in a day to spend networking. At some point we have to be productive to our companies' bottom lines. So, how many networking sites does one *really* need to be involved in? One? A couple? A dozen? Certainly it makes sense to just pick the few at the top of the list and jetison the rest. But if you had to pick just a handful, what would they be?
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Comment by Rick Wilkerson on March 4, 2008 at 11:06am -
No experience with Plaxo here, but I agree there's a low threshold with social networking sites. LinkedIn has helped me re-establish many connections since I moved back from Ohio and I think it will be an important networking tool for me.
Smaller Indiana is fabulous and while I haven't had enough time to give to it yet, is likely to be far more effective because of its focus and because the organizers have done an excellent job of fostering dialog and ideas, so that connecting itself is not the only purpose.
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Comment by Jeb Banner on March 4, 2008 at 11:20am - thanks for the great feedback. I may dig deeper with Plaxo to see if it can be of daily use in managing contacts.
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Comment by Jeb Banner on March 4, 2008 at 11:23am
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Jenn- I have the exact same problem, everyone wants to be my friend cause of my hot pic!
just kidding. Sorry to hear you're getting spammed on this site, I haven't run across it yet, hope they keep the site pure as long as possible.
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Comment by Sarah Robbins on March 4, 2008 at 11:32am -
You know I'm all over this stuff. I LOVE social networks but I think folks forget that the connections are only as good as the follow through. Plaxo makes it almost too easy to spam your contact list with invites. If there's no effort to invite then does the invite mean anything?
I said it last Friday and I'll say it again. If you can't take the time to at least change the default invitation message then don't bother sending the invite.
Social Networks are only useful if used correctly. Collecting meaningless "friends" won't help you. Using the network to stay in touch with people in a genuine way is something else entirely.
I feel your pain, Jeb. :D
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Comment by Jenn Rarick on March 4, 2008 at 11:33am
- Ha ha. I knew I wasn't the only one! Seriously though, I'm sure it's something all women run into on networking sites. Luckily, it's only happened once. I declined the creditor and hairdresser.
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Comment by Lorraine Ball on March 4, 2008 at 11:48am -
As a PC user, I love the plug in for my outlook from LinkedIN. I find the site cleaner and more well organized then Plaxo which feels more and more like Facebook
LinkedIn is an address book on steroids, but not good for much else..
For personal connections.. I prefer SI
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© 2008 Created by Pat Coyle
Beyond that, I haven't found much use in the whole "stream" thing — the address book feature to me is the most useful thing.