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P2P Contact Info Service From Napster Co-Founder
scrm writes "Plaxo is an interesting new service from Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster. It's a P2P-based add-on to Outlook that confronts the old problem of keeping contact lists up-to-date. Mozilla mail support is on the cards, and yes, the company does 'take privacy very seriously'. Check the press here(1), here(2) and here(3). You can also access your contact list over the web."
It's been out for over a year and no one seems to use it/care...
Sounds horrible. I can already drag contacts out of my address book and into iChat, and drag a contact out of iChat into my address book. Furthermore I can mail vCards to and from whomever I wish. Lastly, I can sync addressbooks via SyncML with whomever, and for large organizations, there are directory services. So it seems this Plaxo widget adds basically nothing to my existing abilities.
Cardscan's Accucard already does this- and has for quite some time. When you scan a card, you get the option to add it to Accucard, and the owner of the card(provided they have an email address) gets an email asking if the info is correct and if they'd like to keep their info up to date in the future. Any future copies of their card that get scanned automatically get the new info, I believe.
This is important, because Corex(makers of Cardscan) already have one big thing the P2P companies don't- they have their foot in the door already with their Cardscan units, which are owned by people who need this service the most- sales people and the like. It's like trying to sell gas to car owners, the two just go together. While some sales people may have P2P software on their systems, it's unlikely given the crackdown on p2p apps by many companies....and they're not about to put client information into some two-bit p2p program.
Please help metamoderate.
Furthermore, using PGP, trust values could be assigned to the information.
- Serge Wroclawski
For instance Exchange, until a few versions ago was considered P2P, because all it did was store the outlook calendar info. I have never managed exchange but I believe people who have for a while may remember a time when you use to be able to use calendar on outlook without exchange. This has changed recently ( I've been investigating calendar apps and that was what I was told )
At any rate; If you create an application that uses IMAP to store the calendar info in a special calendar folder, and you have the clients themselves check and resolve conflicts, then your calendar app is P2P.
I'm guessing they're applying the same definition to addressing as well.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
I already hate this software. I'm a network admin, and 3 users have installed Plaxo, two of them after I advised them not to.
One person in another part of the company installed it, and it emailed everyone in his contact list without asking, apparently. Two people under me showed me the email and asked about it; I did some research and decided that it sounded not only like a virus, but definitely against company policy as departmental contact info is sent outside the company.
Here is a rather critical article about Plaxo, followed by an update after speaking with the Plaxo people:
PCMag Article by Bill Machrone
Follow-up article that backs off a bit
I don't trust it, and it sounds like it would violate every large company information policy in existence.
The irony is that my company has an LDAP directory that each of these people use everyday, so WTF are they doing with a contact manager?