Twitter is the new Cocaine. Some advice on how to love and learn from your new bad habit.

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Amazon and others are repeatedly and intentionally activating one of your primal fears. They are pressing your buttons again and again until they get you to start pressing your own buttons. They lead you to believe that you are missing out on something. They have you thinking you will be able to find what you are looking for with just one more click. You can't help yourself. When you post a cool tweet, you want to know who responds. When you bring up the Twitter screen, you first check to see how many followers you have and then click on your friends and rivals pages to see how many people are loving following them and not you.

These social websites reward your clicks with more information about your friends, about you, and about what your friends say they think about you. It's information you just can't get enough of.  It's like taking personality tests and getting feedback on every answer as you answer. You click yes I like "Fight Club" and poof, you find out five of your friends say they like it too. We are all taking the test, and all answering the questions, and all learning more about ourselves and each other.

What's the win?  We get to explore what we're thinking while testing our ideas on others in a relatively safe environment.  We don't just think we learn more about ourselves, we actually do.  We take our assumptions, allow our friends to take a look at them, and gauge their responses. Sure, this system isn't perfect, but the feedback we get costs us nothing and that means we get to test again and again until we arrive at something that works.

This need to find ways to figure out what we are thinking, what our friends are thinking, and to explore the previously untapped resources within our network of friends is deep seated. These social network have found a way to deliver a running commentary on the way we live our lives instantly, cheaply, and in bulk.

The people who own the systems that help us make these explorations are already rich. The opportunity for us lies in the continued expansion of this new frontier.  How can we learn more about others, build our networks, and tap those resources in a way that everyone benefits?

Following just a few simple rules about who we add, who we listen to, how we explore, and how we enter into agreements to create new businesses, I think we're all going to be able to feast upon new worlds of opportunity.

Seven Rules for New Twitterers

1. Follow great minds that both reinforce and challenge what you believe about the world.
   
2. Follow some who have great throngs, if only to figure out why people are thronging
3. Follow everyone you love and encourage those you love to join in the conversation
4. Share only what matters most to you.
5. Encourage everyone, because everyone is struggling with something.
6. Thank everyone who reaches out to you. It's the cheapest, easiest, and surest way to put a smile on someone's face.
7. Share what you have learned about this grand experiment with others. You never know who else might need the benefit of some friends participating in their personal or business growth.

-Phil Yanov is @thinkhammer

Oh no! I killed Plaxo!

I clicked on some crazy group in Plaxo and got the following error message.

Maybe other websites have spoiled me, but couldn't this be just a little more interesting?

Plaxo, LinkedIn, Facebook are passing tablets on the bus

A few times a week I drop by my Linked In, Plaxo, and Facebook accounts and clean up my inboxes in each.



On LinkedIn, I approve those who request to join our groups, and on all of the above I answer the messages that come there and then decide what invitations I am going to accept and which I won't (at this time.)



I've always felt that LinkedIn was the home of my Professional Profile, Facebook was for fun, and Plaxo was just for keeping my multiple address books updated.  Increasingly each of these seems to want to perform some of the functions of the other.



Most insidious has been that Plaxo wants to be LinkedIn.  They've added professional profile information much like LinkedIn and they keep asking me to fill out my profile.  I've ignored the request until today when the screens told me that my profile was 80% complete and I could be 100% complete by answering just a few questions.  I fell for it!  Telling Plaxo where I went to college and what city I live in made me 100% complete. Sadly, I don't feel any different.



When I was a kid, we created lists of questions in our tablets and then we'd pass the tablet around to friends to collect their answers.  Our questions included What's your favorite sport?  Who is your favorite singer? (male and female) What's your favorite color?  We'd feel great when we had answers to all of these important questions from 25 other kids.  No matter how dumb the questions, we'd fill them out with the earnestness that should only accompany an application for citizenship. We loved asking and getting the answers and relished the pages of tablet paper dedicated to this important sociological research.



Now every Professional Social Network has become an online analog of those tablets filled with not very useful information or they've become online dating services asking us these inane questions with the promise of creating meaningful connections with unknown parties.



What's worse is that once I've committed to any of these services, I feel compelled to answer all of the questions in my quest to feel 100% complete.  Thanks for playing me Plaxo.  I've got something else to talk to my therapist about.



I like red an awful lot.

When Stupid meets Evil: Plaxo and Comcast come together

Despite my many frustrations, I have been and remain a long time, paying, Plaxo subscriber. Let me explain. I use Plaxo to keep my address book up to date and sometimes to manage syncing my address book to multiple services. When using it at my peak, I actually kept the following chain of devices in sync pretty well:

The Palm Device
was connected to the Home Laptop (Outlook)
was connected to the Plaxo (on the web)
was connected to the Work PC (Outlook)
was connected to the Blackberry

I've since given up keeping two copies of Outlook in sync, and I no longer carry a Palm. Plaxo added the capability to sync some data to both my Google and Yahoo calenders, and I tried that for a while, but eventually dropped the Yahoo sync, mostly because I didn't care about it as much, and then because it just stopped working. The Google sync, I'd really like to work, but it's partial and has had a number of Plaxo induced failures along the way. It works for a few weeks, something changes, and then it stops but never alerts me that my calendars are now a few days out of sync. Argh!

My frustrations with Plaxo continue. It has an engineer friendly, user hostile interface that makes it pretty easy to hit buttons that they want you to hit. They would rather you issue a spam invite to their networking service than get an address update from them. A recent release of the software even ignored your requests to hide the spammy buttons and Plaxo took weeks to some out with an update to fix the problem.

Plaxo's repeated thrusting of their agenda over that of their users has allowed them to build a community on top of a useful core service. Underneath all of the layers of cruft where they pretend they want to be LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, there is a useful tool that helps you manage a large set of contacts. The tool is so useful that even though the aggravating and inattentive Plaxo has been swallowed up by the much maligned Comcast, I still can't think of any way to get rid of them and still keep my contact database in order. So, I remain a customer. It reminds me of another company that was so much in the habit of abusing it's customers that the sale people regularly chanted the mantra "They might bitch, but they won't switch." I have yet to find my alternate solution. (Feel free to make suggestions, either to me or Plaxo.)

Missed the announcement about the Comcast purchase of Plaxo? Here is today's letter to subscribers:

A Letter from the CEO and Founders

Dear Plaxo member,

We are excited to announce some of the biggest news in the history of Plaxo. Plaxo has signed a definitive agreement** to be acquired by Comcast, the nation's leading provider of entertainment, information and communications products and services. We've got at least a few months to go before the acquisition is completed, but we wanted to send you this note to let you know what's coming up and how it affects you and your account.

Plaxo will remain an independent brand, organization and entity. We've been busy at work on our networked address book service and our next-generation social network, Pulse (if it's been a while, please come back and check out all the new features). And, through additional projects with Comcast, we'll be able to take these services to a lot more users and places than we could on our own... including the TV, phone and more.

If you'd like to read more about some of the great new things we're planning, please read our official announcement.

So, what does this mean for current Plaxo members like you? The services you know and enjoy from Plaxo will not only continue to exist, but will also continue to evolve and improve. We will continue to make our basic services free, and we will continue to serve customers in multiple languages across the world. But, we'll now be able to invest even more in our services, and we will enhance them with more users and more content available across a wider array of devices.

We will also continue to protect your privacy and give you control of your information. We will continue to protect your data with one of the strongest privacy policies, which will remain in effect even after the transition. And, we'll continue to be a strong advocate for the open social web.

We've put together a quick Q&A about your privacy, account and your data.

Last, we'd like to extend an enormous thank you. Whether you've been a Plaxo user for a long time or just recently joined Pulse, we'd like to thank you for making Plaxo a vibrant network. We are excited to open a new chapter today and look forward to helping you keep in touch with the people you care about.


Sincerely,

Ben Golub, Chief Executive Officer
Cameron Ring, Founder and Chief Architect
Todd Masonis, Founder and Vice President of Products

**We are not releasing financial details of the transaction. The acquisition is subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals, and is expected to close in the near future.

Visit Phil's Plaxo Profile

2200 reasons to avoid Plaxo 3.0 today...

The new Plaxo 3.0 was released for preview today. Scoble is gushing. He really wants to love it. Congrats to him for being the first to put the release into the blogosphere. I appreciate even more that he expressed a bit of concern over it's first day response times. I wish I had read more closely and thought about it a bit harder... instead, I tried to upgrade and synch with the new version...



I wish I had waited. I'll tell you what has got me excited about the new 3.0 and looking forward to the day I can safely upgrade. Plaxo 3.0 goes beyond syncing with Oulook. It (purportedly) will allow you to sync contacts and calendar with GMail, Yahoo Mail, AOL, MSN mail, Thunderbird, and more. The problem is that it actually timed out during the initial sync, causing me to panic and ask it to revert me to Plaxo Classic (their term.) In response to my request, I got the error message above. I have a sick feeling about this...

Let me start again, this time by saying, I am not one of those people that say Plaxo was once popular, but fell off because of spam, etc, etc. I am a person who uses Plaxo every day and have done so for a couple of years or thereabouts. I have successfully used Plaxo to keep two computers, a Palm PDA and a Blackberry in flawless synch. I woudl regard myself as something of a power user of Plaxo as I have an address book with now over 2260 contacts in it and a fairly complex calendar. Although I no longer carry a Palm, and I am currently back to synching with just one computer, I have found Plaxo to be a real boon to my personal productivity. I make a point for example, when establishing a new business relationship, to send my contact info via Plaxo to new clients. I also make a point of asking them to update their information to me via Plaxo. I never do this in bulk, but I always ask after establishing an initial and credible contact with the new person. I find that a majority of them key the data into Plaxo and get me updated right away. Since I have already rewarded them with a quick, easy to use, and attractive link with all of my data attached and ready for import into their contact manager, I think I might be doing them the favor of sticking myself in their address book without them having to key in my info. Like I said, if you establish a credible link in advance, Plaxo's system of exchanging contact info is quick and easy and spam-free. If you click the bulk emailer, your contacts are likely not to reply as they feel like they are bing beat up by yet another anonymous bot attempting to collect their contact information for the sole purpose of beating them up with more useless information later.

What I like about Plaxo 3.0

• Plaxo 3.0 synchs with Google and that is yummy. (FYI -- Calendar Synch is working. Contact Synch is coming soon.) So far, nothing else synchs with my Google address or calendar. Finally!


• Plaxo synchs with Yahoo and I might even use that!


• Plaxo synchs with the Mac and I think there may be one of those in my very near future.

What I don't like about the new Plaxo 3.0

• It's ugly. While most online software is getting better looking every day, the new Plaxo screen is a step backwards. The new screen is cluttered and clumsy looking. It's almost as though they took a look at MySpace and Yahoo and picked some of the clunkiest design elements of each. The screen looks unfinished, although populated by stuff I couldn't care less about. Has no one figured out that I already receive the weather in about a thousand other places? Why should I give up yet more screen real estate to a thing I can do nothing about?


• It doesn't quite work, yet. Users are not just complaining the system is slow, it simply doesn't work in some places. In my particular case, the system errored out and my reovery path took me to the message above. Quite frankly, I don't know at this moment whether Plaxo works on my computer or not. It's quite possible that I am at least temporarily disconnected from my online Plaxo contacts.

Why I will be upgrading to Plaxo 3.0 -- even if it doesn't happen today.

• Plaxo is a power tool for the social networker. It brings order and automation to the more tedious parts of social networking. It provides a mechanism for sending electronic business cards in an easily digested format and will even automatically update those who take the initiative to synchronize the Plaxo address book with their other address books. It's a power tool for the power networker.

Watch the Plaxo update video:

ps: I have 2260 contacts in my Outlook address book, thus the title of this post.

UPDATE: I can see my Plaxo contacts in the old Plaxo, which is asking the question...

Not today...