cruel to be kind

Today I got a ping about “Status Update: Plaxo and Facebook are now in an “Open Relationship”“.

We’re really excited about this integration. We think it’s going to be really good for our business and really good for Facebook’s business. More importantly, it’s going to be great for users.

I also got excited reading the news, because one of the biggest problems is to keep the data synced. Xing (german version of Linkedin) for example is *the* way of having updated contact information for all your contacts. But as not everybody is on Xing – or for a matter of fact on Linkedin.  Plaxo is great for managing the contact data in one place and even sync that to the computer.

Plaxo came in handy here and have some additional nice offerings like deduping of contact data and ecards. I happily paid the 50 bucks for a premium account for a company that helps me manage the addresss data of my contacts. As such a connection of Facebook and Plaxo would be great to gather additionally the information currently just hold in Facebook into Plaxo. You know, like phone numbers, web address, normal adress etc. Like the real data I sign up with Plaxo in the first place?

But reading the announcement I get the impression that the only focus was not put on what I do pay Plaxo for as a premium member, which is being the place for me to have my contact information collected and synced. But on “hey great, another system you can put your status update into”. I am sorry, but Plaxo is not my destination to have status update, it is the place where I also feed the information into.  I don’t diminish the fact that this was a lot of work and surely something great.  But that was just the first step, ground work, I understand.

As a second step it is promised that I can sign into plaxo via Facebook connect. Which I assume is great for a website I do not even get the login box on the front page. Dear Plaxo, can you please tell me when you will be restructuring your premium accounts to reflect the fact that obviously the direction where the money is allocated is not going in the direction you promise to?

I understand that this feature will probably bring in a lot of new users to Plaxo. But they too will not be looking for having yet another place to share status updates. But for a service which helps them to do a task better. You know, like for example contact management.

For 50 bucks I can happily pay a site like Batchbook to sync my data with Gmail contacts for 5 months of the year. I still have to pay for the rest of that, but at least that company is working on being a tool for managing my address data and not on being the next status update tool.

Like for example: Allow me to structure the contact data into separate kategories, tag them and search them. As I said, full sync with Gmail, sync with a mailing list tool like Mailchimp for mailings to people.  It does not yet sync with Outlook but after Gmail doing syncs with my mobile phone, I do not need that any more.

My status update for today on plaxo? Thanks for sharing the news, but this is the reason to cancel my premium member account. I am going to use the feature till the end of my premium time in two months, and after that I will pay the money to a service which actually develops features in the direction I am paying them for.