Plaxo’s Answer to Facebook

As many of you know I’ve been following the evolution of Facebook pretty closely, so I was interested to see Plaxo’s rumored response land today.

Up till today, Plaxo has been an address book management tool that’s gotten decent adoption among the business crowd. It syncs with your desktop (Mac or Windows) and makes sure that when one of your Plaxo-enabled colleagues changes his contact info, your copy is auto-magically updated. It’s useful.

Today they slapped on a social network. And surprisingly, it’s not half bad.

• They recognize that the newsfeed is one of the killer features of Facebook, and that many of us already live online on many different sites. So they let you link up with your existing webservices (screenshot) like Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, your blog, Del.icio.us, Last.fm, My Space, Xanga, LJ, Yahoo 360, etc. Smart.
• They also recognize that being able to control who sees your information among groups of people you know — your business contacts, your friends, and your family — is a common request on Facebook. So they let you control it on a feed-by-feed basis. (screenshot)
• They’ve even built in lightweight twitter/pownce-like functionality (screenshot) and, like everything else on Plaxo, given you control over which of your groups sees what you want to send.

So what’s wrong with it? Well the site feels a little creaky and doesn’t work in Safari yet, but that can be fixed. The bigger problem is you have to create all your connections all over again!

It’s astonishing that this is the case, but despite the fact that Plaxo Pulse has access to my address book (and the best tools of any social network for keeping it in sync) it’s not smart enough to connect me to the people I know automatically (say, by looking to see if each of the people in my address book also have me in theirs.)

Instead, I must invite people to my network one-by-one. (screenshot)

Plaxo’s done some smart thinking in designing Pulse, but it doesn’t seem to be an open platform (yet). And do we really want to go establish our connections one-by-one on yet another social network?

Related: Brian pointed me to his posts on Portable Social Networks as part of the work he’s doing with Tantek and others.