Does Plaxo flood your inbox with connection requests?

Plaxo started life as a place to hold your contact information online.

That was quite handy and they allowed synchronising from your Mac or PC so your contact data were always held safe in the cloud.

More recently Plaxo added a feature called Pulse. Pulse allows you to tell it where you publish photos, blog posts, bookmarks etc. and it creates a lifestream, a la Facebook which it publishes to your Pulse network.

All sounds nice, right?

Sure, however, for some reason, and I don’t know why, of all the social networks I have joined (and I have joined a few!) Pulse seems to generate the most emails. The emails typically have the subject line “[someone I have never heard of] has added you as a business connection”

On Facebook and Xing, the other two social networks I frequent most, I occasionally get connection requests from people I don’t know. But not very often, and usually a bit of digging will show how they are connected to me.

However, on Plaxo I get waaay too many of these business connections and I have no idea where they are coming from.

Is this just me or are others finding Plaxo also generates too many connection requests from strangers?

11 thoughts on “Does Plaxo flood your inbox with connection requests?”

  1. I wonder if the difference in being able to designate the type of relationship.

    With Facebook or Twitter etc. they imply a certain intimacy. I know I’ve found myself reluctant to “follow” some people on Twitter as it actually feels a little stalker-ish.

    When you put the context of “Business Connection” in the mix it’s a little less personal so people are probably more likely to send the request.

    Also – if people have you in their address book Plaxo will make a loose connection automatically by keeping your info up to date in their address book. If a lot of people have you in their address book you’ll also get suggested as someone to connect with…

  2. Apologies if you got a Plaxo email from me today, Tom. I got several emails from Plaxo and one took me to a page saying “Connect to Tom on Plaxo.” I assumed it was a “Tom is already on Plaxo, just connect” kind of action but after doing the same thing for another friend I was told it is sending out emails to non-members. Very annoying, there is no warning from Plaxo. The wording is all “Connect.”

    Plaxo was doing well for awhile but they seem to have fallen back to old habits. Sad.

  3. In a previous iteration, Plaxo was notorious for spamming the contacts you had listed on it to get them to sign up for Plaxo service – after many complaints the publicly renounced this policy and promised to be on their best behaviour.

    From your blogpost, I’m not sure if they’ve really bought into the Mindset that you’re just lending them your data, and that you still own and control it …


  4. When you see a “connect” button in Pulse, it is an indication that the person is a Plaxo member. Clicking it will *not* send an invitation to a non-member.

    We are experiencing a growth surge that has taken us a bit by surprise. (Pulse is still in beta; we have just started to promote it to our address book user base.) As part of that surge, a lot of users are connecting to a lot of other users.

  5. John,

    you may want to re-think that. I’m getting flooded with connection requests from complete and total strangers.

    Pulse started out with a good name. You are in danger of losing that fast.

  6. They are spamming me as well…
    I got some email from some German sounding person I have never even heard of, I’ve definitely never been to Plaxo, and what a miserable way to offer only “opt-out@ when I have never and would never ever want to opt in to that!
    My tolerance to spamming is sort of low, so if any of my friends would do that, I think I’ll remove them also in Linkedin and Facebook.


  7. So, what does it mean if I get an e mail from Pulse and it says :
    Dear Valeria and Cletus (not his real name)
    (This guy you know) wants to add you as a contact.

    Does this mean he has us on his page as contacts and this Pulse thingie invited us or does this mean he is inviting us himself?

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