Privacy fears prompt Fry to quit Plaxo
Stephen Fry has quit Plaxo after he became annoyed that the social networking site was revealing what he sees as too many personal details with anyone visiting the site - as opposed to designated contacts. Plaxo, which was co-founded by Napster co-creator Sean Parker, maintains an online address book and social networking …
...as hell. - Remind me of vogon poetry, actually.
All tweets are boring. That appears to be the whole point of twitter.
When I first signed up to Plaxo it was an excellent service that allowed me to sync my address book on various computers and check my address book online when travelling. This used to be free. Then they started to want to be a kind of Facebook with all that messaging stuff and syncing became a premium (and not cheap) option. I can see the day coming when I delete my Plaxo account.
Who honestly cares? Stephen Fry is just an unfunny, pretentious, pseudo-intellectual twat with a posh accent.
Who the hell puts their address and mobile no on the interspaz?
How dare they contradict Lord Stephen of Fry; QI Mater; walking encylopedia; and all round good egg. If Mr Fry says Plaxo in the the wrong, then they are; end of; no further discussion required.
To remember that Fry is bipolar, and could quite easily just be having a bad day and ranting at something and nothing, however publically.
Incidentally, this is the first time i have ever heard of Plaxo? it sounds more like a drug manufacturing company rather than a social networking site
meanwhile, in other news.... intensive research reveals the pope is a catholic and bears shit in the woods. WTF?
so some sad bastard signs up for a yet another waste of time sad social networking site. saddo gives said site their contact info. they probably don't know or care what the web site can and will do with that data. web site lets that data leak. waddo whinges. why is any of this news or even vaguely interesting?
conclusions:
1) don't put your private contact info on a web site, ever.
2) avoid social networking web sites. get a life instead. go to the pub. have a shag. watch noel edmonds on the telly.
I spam blacklisted Plaxo years ago when I started getting email from them claiming to be from people who know me trying to contact me - but without saying who they are. If people who know me want to contact me then they can do so directly, and if someone else offers to act as an intermediary then if they don't want to cause themselves mail delivery problems they can stop behaving like a spammer.
If it looks and quacks like a spammer then it is one.
For god sake man, get yourself a web site and do your ablutions there. All these centralised bilge producing sites are for the freaks and unwashed masses.
Personally, I feel a little dirty posting here, but hey sometimes I like it filthy ;)
I like Fry well enough offline and don't follow him online but you know his web presence is too large when he ends up being discussed on here. The man's a luvvie, clearly he needs Twitter almost as much as Twitter needed him.
Some time ago I got an invitation to join Plaxo, from a trusted colleague. I joined, and it promptly blasted out unsolicited invites to a bunch of people whose names seemed to be taken from my linkedin contact list (and I had *not* divulged my linkedin password). That irritated the hell out of me, and when I asked my contact why she'd invited me to join such a shitty site she said that she hadn't, plaxo had just played the same trick on her.
I still don't know what was going on, but that Plaxo account got deleted faster than you can say "feck off".
god this is years old, i remember all the sales peeps wanting to get plaxo installed. only to find that it dumped all their contacts out there in the inter-tubes.
not only that, but wasn't there a stupid plaxo toolbar thing that borked outlook/'exchange in a variety of interesting and inconvinient ways?
plaxo to my mind has all the legitimate usability, and usefullness, of the "smiley toolbar" malware.
get rid of it, and you'll get less spam, your machine will be less crashy, and life will be better.
Like a few others here, I started receiving invitations to join up with Plaxo. It took me all of 5 seconds to decide to blacklist them. There's no way I'm going to put my contact details up on the 'net and expect an outfit like Plaxo to keep them confidential.
... but the implementation makes it less desirable.
Many moons ago (in fact two countries ago) I signed up to Plaxo ont he promise that as I moved around changing addresses and phone numbers and email addresses Plaxo would automagically keep all my friends updated.
Sadly not only did they fail miserably at that task the only thing they seem good at is asking for money and introducing me to random strangers.
It also occured to me that most of the time if I lose touch with folks it's for a reason (ot lack of reason to keep in touch) so the value proposition of Plaxo isn't actually there anyway.
LinkedIn for work, Facebook for friends, Twitter for public rambling and MySpace to warm my kids what will happen if they don't study hard at school and get a job
Stephen Fry the unadulterated media whore?
*That* Stephen Fry?
When Plaxo invites first appeared in our inboxes about 5 or 6 years ago I strongly advised the management to ignore invites and ask the sender to remove their details from the database.
The problem is that a user uploads their address book to the site so now you have your details on a third party site without your permission. Plaxo may the change their privacy policay and allow those details to be read without your permission and you would never know.
Also their terms and conditions stated that if the company was sold then the database would be sold with it.
What sort of company would wish to buy a company that wasn't making any money and just consisted of millions of contact details? Hmmm...
If a private individual uploads their contact list to Plaxo they are not doing anything wrong. However anybody using in a business capacity would well be considered to have breached data protection laws. They would be passing personal data to a third party without permission and we all know that only the government are allowed to do that.
Who honestly cares? Stephen Fry is just an unfunny, pretentious, pseudo-intellectual twat with a posh accent.
And you are ...?
Oh yes, an Anonymous Coward.
Funny, I had actually forgotten about Plaxo until this..
Got invites to join this a couple of years back (mainly to mailing lists I am on, but a few to my personal email account as well)..
I didn't sign up, because just attaching my phone to each computer and synching the contacts does a good job of keeping my contacts lists up to date on every computer I use. I don't use my contacts list on other computers, if I need to look up a contact, I look it up on my phone.
The other reason is I am naturally cautious when giving out my details. Even where I fill out details on a site I trust (like Facebook), I only put the vaguest of details on the site (nothing that is not publicly available). Even a forum I have managed for years (and know the Owner personally) only has vague details in my profile.
I would certainly not upload my contacts list to something like Plaxo..
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