Plaxo is missing one feature that I think would elevate it to killer app. Interestingly, you hit on this feature in a post some time in the past year.

I coded a proof of concept a few weeks ago, and showed it to about 20 associates in the industry, and all said that it was a viable answer.

Alas... There Is No More VC In This Country. Period. And I'm not going to quit my day job.

Bret,

I'm sure you're friends and associates appreciate the assistance you provided them when responding to their Update Requests. It's one thing for people to send out their contact information through email. But Plaxo provides the benefit of helping to manage this information and get it back into the person's address book with minimal manual intervention.

We'll be adding a feature in a upcoming release that should make responding to multiple Update Requests much easier for people who are not Plaxo members. I'd also like to mention a few of the features you may not realize are available to non-Plaxo members.

Auto-Reply account: you can create what's known as a auto-reply account with Plaxo. The information you provide in the auto-reply account will be used to respond automatically to Update Requests sent to you by Plaxo members. This way, you can still provide the information you wish to your friends and associates who are requesting an update, but it will be done automatically for you.

Opt-out from Update Requests: If you don't wish to receive any further Update Requests, we include in a link within the Update Request which allows you to stop receiving Update Requests from a single Plaxo member, or all Plaxo members.

Become a Plaxo member! - I'm not trying to sell you on anything, but Update Request are only necessary for communicating with non-Plaxo members. If you were a Plaxo member, the Plaxo Network could handle all updates between you and other Plaxo members automatically, without requiring any action on the part of the Plaxo members. Your address book could always be kept updated and accurate, based upon the information granted to you by other Plaxo members within your address book.

Hope this helps. Drop me a line if you have any further questions or comments.

Regards,

Stacy Martin
Plaxo Privacy Officer

I forgot to include some links:

Auto-Reply: http://www.plaxo.com/autoreply
Opt-out: Click on link in Update Request or go to: http://www.plaxo.com/opt-out
Download Plaxo: http://www.plaxo.com/downloads

Stacy Martin
Plaxo Privacy Officer
smartin @t Plaxo.com

Wow, that's either some of the best customer service I've ever seen, or the best targetted spam I've ever seen.

Or both :-)

(No offense, Stacy - have your CTO call me. I know the killer feature you're missing. *cough*)

Please excuse the anonymity.

I must ask this about it's compatibility. Recently, the school I worked with encountered a pc runinng plaxo in conjuction with office xp pro. We tried to password the .pst file, but it never worked. As soon as we uninstalled plaxo, we were able to require a password to run outlook. Any clue as to why this happened?

Death to Plaxo I agree! Plaxo, despite all they say, is effectively spyware and while the service is a great concept, I strongly warn against its use. Their software mined from my computer, and distributed to literally dozens of other computers, very private security information that was not in any way connected to my address book or date book, but instead located elsewhere within my Palm and Outlook based organizer setup. This information included how to disable our home security system!

Plaxo can say all they want, but their security 'glitches' are far more risky than the benefits justify in using this software. What's worse, I never authorized ANY sync of my data with Plaxo, I merely set up an account because of an organization I work with who uses Plaxo. When I installed and sync'ed Outlook to my Palm PDA, Plaxo's software 'self-authorized' that sync, which I had intentionally NOT done.

To illustrate how much Plaxo really cares (none) their so-called head of security/privacy issues "Mac" refused to even look into the situation except for a few feel good emails back and forth to me before he stopped responding when I asked him to really look into this and reverse the data they sent out by resending blank data somehow. Plaxo has no interest in doing anything other than covering this up - including having a blog on their own website that they edit or refuse to post unless they like it...some blog. However, they are great PR hype'rs, since Stacy Martin seems to catch and counter all negative (read: honest) blogs I can find on the web about this, pretty much the same brush off I got from Mac when I brought this egregious breach of privacy to their attention.

DO NOT USE THIS SOFTWARE IF THERE IS ANYTHING PRIVATE OR SECURE ON YOUR COMPUTER.

I will modify, and somewhat retract, my statements above - after two and a half months of working with Plaxo on this issue. Firstly, credit is due to Stacy Martin, the Plaxo Privacy Officer who spent many hours trying to figure out how things went wrong and to alleviate my fears and perception that my private secure info got posted to others in my address book.

While there is no way at this point to be 100% certain, it would appear that the message Plaxo generated on my computer was not indicative of what really happened - Plaxo can sync Notes and Tasks from a Palm device or Outlook (or in my case, both, since they are linked), but does not sync either of those catagories to anyone else, only the date book and/or address book.

While there is no excuse for the first Plaxo privacy person's (Mac) disappearing on me without doing anything, Ms. Martin did an excellent job of trying to mend the damage. Not too little too late, though of course, it was a bit too late, since I had to post this and several other blogs to get the attention. I am most impressed that in this process, Ms. Martin took the time to understand with the Plaxo software engineering department what appears to be some room for improvement in the set up and activation processes, improvement which I'm told by her that she has their engineering group already hard at work to make changes on. If that's the case, then they deserve an "A" for the after-the-fact fix, and the only real harm was the lack of customer service their initial representative showed, which set me off after a scary message was generated by their software.

I'm not going back to using Plaxo, but I withdraw the venom of my criticism and extend my thanks to them for their efforts.