Plaxo annoyance

I use Plaxo, and for the most part it's a decent service. I know others who have complained about getting spam from Plaxo, but it's been my experience that it's not from Plaxo itself, it's from people who don't understand what "request an update" really does and use it indiscriminately. The easiest way to make those emails go away is to put your information in Plaxo so that those idiots can feel safe and secure about having your up-to-date information. That's why I originally started using Plaxo. Eventually I decided that I wanted to have all of my address book in one place instead of split between the five different places I was using, so I added everything to Plaxo (with the exception of a handful of people who are militant about Plaxo being evil because of the spam-- while I disagree, I still prefer to respect their wishes. And I never, ever use the "Request an update" link, nor the "invite your friends" link.)

Plaxo's newest offering is "Plaxo Pulse", which is basically a glorified RSS reader. People put links to their journals or flickr site or whatever, and Plaxo will share it with other people who you are already connected to. Great if you use Plaxo regularly. Less great if you don't, but it's still a way for me to find that someone has a journal and decide whether I want to add it to my own RSS reader.

Except, Plaxo offered the option of creating a journal within Plaxo. And one of my friends who is completely new to blogging decided to use it, because it's easy.

Sam is a wonderful guy. In the last year or so, he's mentioned several things in passing that startled me in the "Wow, I wouldn't have guessed that" sense, and each time my reaction has been "Why do I not know Sam better than I do?". I WANT Sam to blog, because I want to read what he has to say. In theory, the fact that Plaxo has made it easy for Sam to blog is a good thing, because it encourages him to do so.

But in the process of making it easy, Plaxo seems to have screwed it up. There is no RSS feed directly from Plaxo, so I can't add Sam's fledgling blog to the place where I will actually read it routinely. Plaxo *claims* that the journal originates at a blogspot journal, but actually following the link provided gives a "Page Not Found" error. Which is a shame, because blogspot does have RSS feeds, and if that part actually worked as advertised my problem would be solved.

Ah, but Plaxo offers the option to email me whenever someone adds something to their "Pulse" feed. The problem is, I can either set it to email me whenever everyone on my contact list posts something new, or never. There's no individual, per-contact setting. And my contact list also includes Ed, who is a great guy but very prolific in posting, including a daily post of links. I prefer to read Ed's posts in my RSS reader, where I can easily ignore the links when I'm not in the mood but still see when the post is more personal. (Also, I can no longer find the setting to make it stop emailing me when people post, so even if I did decide to change it, I can't.)

The real annoyance, though, is that Plaxo has a setting for "filters" that looks like it might allow me to group people into "email me" and "don't email me"... and there is no discernible way to actually create a filter. The help text says you can do it from the "Actions" menu on each feed, but it lies because there's no option for filtering on the "Actions" menu. I absolutely hate when help text lies.

Plaxo annoyance

I use Plaxo, and for the most part it's a decent service. I know others who have complained about getting spam from Plaxo, but it's been my experience that it's not from Plaxo itself, it's from people who don't understand what "request an update" really does and use it indiscriminately. The easiest way to make those emails go away is to put your information in Plaxo so that those idiots can feel safe and secure about having your up-to-date information. That's why I originally started using Plaxo. Eventually I decided that I wanted to have all of my address book in one place instead of split between the five different places I was using, so I added everything to Plaxo (with the exception of a handful of people who are militant about Plaxo being evil because of the spam-- while I disagree, I still prefer to respect their wishes. And I never, ever use the "Request an update" link, nor the "invite your friends" link.)

Plaxo's newest offering is "Plaxo Pulse", which is basically a glorified RSS reader. People put links to their journals or flickr site or whatever, and Plaxo will share it with other people who you are already connected to. Great if you use Plaxo regularly. Less great if you don't, but it's still a way for me to find that someone has a journal and decide whether I want to add it to my own RSS reader.

Except, Plaxo offered the option of creating a journal within Plaxo. And one of my friends who is completely new to blogging decided to use it, because it's easy.

Sam is a wonderful guy. In the last year or so, he's mentioned several things in passing that startled me in the "Wow, I wouldn't have guessed that" sense, and each time my reaction has been "Why do I not know Sam better than I do?". I WANT Sam to blog, because I want to read what he has to say. In theory, the fact that Plaxo has made it easy for Sam to blog is a good thing, because it encourages him to do so.

But in the process of making it easy, Plaxo seems to have screwed it up. There is no RSS feed directly from Plaxo, so I can't add Sam's fledgling blog to the place where I will actually read it routinely. Plaxo *claims* that the journal originates at a blogspot journal, but actually following the link provided gives a "Page Not Found" error. Which is a shame, because blogspot does have RSS feeds, and if that part actually worked as advertised my problem would be solved.

Ah, but Plaxo offers the option to email me whenever someone adds something to their "Pulse" feed. The problem is, I can either set it to email me whenever everyone on my contact list posts something new, or never. There's no individual, per-contact setting. And my contact list also includes Ed, who is a great guy but very prolific in posting, including a daily post of links. I prefer to read Ed's posts in my RSS reader, where I can easily ignore the links when I'm not in the mood but still see when the post is more personal. (Also, I can no longer find the setting to make it stop emailing me when people post, so even if I did decide to change it, I can't.)

The real annoyance, though, is that Plaxo has a setting for "filters" that looks like it might allow me to group people into "email me" and "don't email me"... and there is no discernible way to actually create a filter. The help text says you can do it from the "Actions" menu on each feed, but it lies because there's no option for filtering on the "Actions" menu. I absolutely hate when help text lies.