By Davis Freeberg
Techdirt is out with a post this morning reporting that Plaxo has agreed to stop encouraging people to spam their friends about their service. For those of you who haven’t seen Plaxo yet, it’s basically a social networking service that allows you to upload a list of your outlook contacts and then synch your calendar with theirs. I’ve looked at the service in the past and have read their blog quite a bit, but personally, I’ve been pretty underwhelmed by the service and find the constant “invites” to the service to be pretty annoying. At this point I have no intention of turning over sensitive contact information to a service that doesn’t seem to offer any real compelling benefits and would prefer to not be contacted, but every time someone I know joins the service a whole new round of emails start up again. On one hand I applaud Plaxo for de-emphasizing their spam all your friends feature, but I still think it’s terrible that the company has a policy that prevents people from opting out of unsolicited email without joining the service. I think that email can be an effective way to grow a new business, but given the amount of email that Plaxo sends out each day, they really should be more responsible about how they advertise to the general public.
Editor’s note: Davis has repeatedly denied my attempts at giving him a friendly Plaxo invite/hugg for years. This is cold and wrong.