Plaxo Storm!

Over the past few months, I have been receiving intermittent e-mails from Plaxo. Some from people I knew, some from complete strangers. I used the tool back around 2000 or so and eventually stopped, frustrated with the spammy updates I was getting. So I quit.

This morning, curiosity finally got the better of me and I very quickly and easily (to the Plaxo folks' credit) created a login for myself. I was in for a pleasant surprise. In previous posts, I've talked a bit about Ning and the SPR Alumni network I created there for my company. As I waded into the Plaxo interface and updated my profile, I quickly found it to be a similar experience in terms of the user-centered experience and functionality.

What I found Plaxo to be good at was integration with the rest of my "Web" life... it was pretty simple to grab contacts from an Outlook address book, my Gmail account's contacts, Yahoo! Email contacts. Even cooler, though, I found ways to integrate with my Flickr account and, more importantly to my recruiting needs, all of my LinkedIn contacts. If you happen to be a Facebook or MySpace junkie, they integrate, too. Overall, I found that to be the very best feature.

Some of what they're doing feels kind of kludgy. It was uber easy to create a special interest group for my network (the Wisconsin Professional Recruiters Resource), but figuring out how to actually "share" information (like pictures, a blog entry, or a file) as opposed to sharing with my network or sharing with Pulse (same thing?) was puzzling.

I do like the Pulse feature--it works like LinkedIn's network updates, but shows up neat stuff like blog entries, too.

So what's the difference between Ning and Plaxo? There are a few. Ning makes you build a networking group first. Plaxo works in a much more straightforward fashion, more like a Facebook or LinkedIn. You connect to people and, if you want, you create a special interest group later. So far, I like Ning's sharing features better. Also, it is more intuitive to ping your friends with messages within your group or privately.

Will I use it? Sure, it's reasonably fun to work with and I piled up a pretty good list of contacts in it.

I guess the bigger question is where all of these social networks are going. We seem to be moving more toward convergence and I am already pretty burdened by keeping up with all of the major social networks for recruiting purposes. If I had to choose just one, I'd still go with LinkedIn alone for its professional bent. Plaxo seems like it's trying to satisfy two masters--something reflected in profile design itself. You have a "Personal" profile and a "Professional" profile, and you can specify who sees what about you. My guess is that the cool kids will still hang out on Facebook until something cooler comes along and not look back at an old dog like Plaxo... no matter how many new tricks he's got.

Still, it's heartening to see companies playing around with new ways to attract users to the social networks. The bottom line in a professional sense is how easy it is to find and recruit candidates for your job openings and it is yet another tool in the shed to that end.